Brown For Life

I woke and realized that it was our final full day in the East Coast, which kind of sucks, I'm starting to like this place. But our day wasn't over just yet, our last stop for this college tour was an all women's college: Wellesley. For breakfast, we visited the the same cafe as yesterday, since Jenny mentioned that it had the most variety out of all the other cafes in town. I ordered a plain bagel with cream cheese and even added smoked salmon to it, which was super good. We left Providence at around 8:45 AM and got to Wellesley, Massachusetts at 9:50. From there on we went to the admissions office and prepared for the tour. 

Inside Wellesley's science building

Once again we had a personal tour of the campus, exclusive for the ILC group only. Our guide was Dylan, a current sophomore at Wellesley and a history major. She gave us a very well and informative tour of the campus, and even showed us the dorms! The dorms were much nicer than at Perkins, especially the bathrooms. It was so cleaner and nicer than the bathrooms at Perkins (I still have love for Perkins though). The showers had actual colored tiles and just looked more appealing. After the tour, Dylan had lunch with us at the Blue Ginger just about 7 minutes away from the campus. I was trying to save me appetite for dinner later on tonight, so I ordered a salmon salad instead (I know right, Maria ordering a salad?!) Besides eating my amazing salad, we were also able to ask Dylan any questions regarding Wellesley. She mentioned that Wellesley is part of the 7 sister schools that team up together in where students are able to spend time in each of the colleges studying a specific course or major. After lunch, we made our way back to the admission's office for the information session. Leigh explained several things about the college including their study abroad programs and just the different activities that they do around campus. She also mentioned that Wellesley goes by the honor code system and has no curfew. There is also a 100% women involvement around the campus and are heavily active. One of the great things that I love about the college is it's 8 to 1 student/teacher ratio with a class average of only 12. There are over 1,000 courses to take at Wellesley and also has 56 majors. For their study abroad program, at 50% of their juniors decide to study abroad, which is what I'm looking forward to, if I ever apply to Wellesley. Wellesley also has a 26% acceptance rate and students can apply for early decision or early evaluation. I admire Wellesley because they are an all girls school, which is especially good since there isn't much competition in courses such as science.

With Professor Jason 

After our beautiful tour of Wellesley, we headed back to Providence and got ready for our last fancy dinner of the trip. I was fortunate enough to sit next to Lydia, who also took the Women and Leadership course back in 2012. To my left was Professor Jason, who teaches and lectures chemistry. Across from me was Luis, who is an admission officer at Brown and Manuel, a current student who assisted in our scholarship workshop last week. The conversations during this dinner were all very interesting and I learned a lot from Lydia as she talked about her experiences learning a new language in Argentina and Dubai. She told us that she applied for this program that takes you to another foreign country with a host family to learn a specific college. Her experiences in Dubai were very fun and she was happy to be able to spend a year in a foreign place to learn about their culture and language. I asked Luis about what they look for when admitting students to Brown. I wanted to know what makes an applicant stand out for them. He replied to me by saying that every story is unique since every person is different. You don't have to pretend or create a sob story to stand out from everyone else since everyone's story is not all the same. This dinner gave me more motivation to apply to Ivy League schools especially Brown. At the end of the dinner, everyone said their goodbyes. Instead of walking home, Guy and Jason were kind enough to give us a ride back to the hotel. I am fortunate enough to have this final dinner before we went home since I was able to meet a lot of people and get their contact information. Well tomorrow's the day in which we leave Providence, hopefully I will come back again next fall as a Brown Bear student. 

With Luis and Jinny