How to Write the Brown University Supplemental Essays 2027: Prompts, Examples & Strategy Guide

Brown University requires three essays and one short answer for the 2026-27 cycle. The three essays are: an Open Curriculum essay (250 words), a Growing Up essay (250 words), and a Joy essay (150 words). The short answer is a Teach a Class prompt (150 words). This cycle brought significant changes: the old academic-interests essay was replaced by a new Open Curriculum essay anchored to a President Paxson quote about Brown student characteristics; the Joy essay dropped from 200-250 words to 150; the Teach a Class short answer grew from 100 to 150 words; and the three-word self-description and one-sentence Why Brown prompts were both eliminated. Dean of Admission Logan Powell describes Brown's central criterion as 'excellence in context' — students who excelled within their specific environment. Early Decision deadline: November 1. Regular Decision: January 5.

The Brown University supplemental essays for the 2026–27 admissions cycle consist of three essays and one short-answer question.

This guide covers every Brown supplemental essay prompt for 2027 and explains what the admissions office evaluates for each. It provides annotated examples of what strong responses look like. Applicants should always confirm current prompts on Brown's official admissions website before beginning their essays.

I'm Christopher Hunt, a college essay coach with over a decade of experience helping students gain admission to the Ivy League, Stanford, and other highly selective universities. I've worked one-on-one with more than 700 students and reviewed hundreds of Brown supplements. The mistake I see most often is students treating the essays as separate tasks and writing each one in isolation without thinking about how they work together.

Brown's prompts are not separate. They are three angles on the same question: are you the kind of person who can direct your own intellectual life?

Brown University Supplemental Essay Prompts for 2026–27

Brown requires all first-year applicants to complete three essays and one short-answer question.

Essay 1: Open Curriculum (250 words)

“There is something distinctive about Brown students. It is a blend of intellectual curiosity, creativity, and humility. A commitment to collaboration. An openness to new ideas and perspectives. A desire to make the world better. And it is resilience: the ability to recover and thrive after experiencing difficulties.” — President Christina Paxson, 2025 Convocation Address. How will you use these characteristics or others to shape your approach to the Open Curriculum?

Essay 2: Growing Up (250 words)

Students entering Brown often find that making their home on College Hill naturally invites reflection on where they came from. Share how an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you, and what unique contributions this might allow you to make to the Brown community.

Essay 3: Joy (150 words)

Brown students care deeply about their work and the world around them. Students find contentment, satisfaction, and meaning in daily interactions and major discoveries. Whether big or small, mundane or spectacular, tell us about something that brings you joy.

Short Answer: Teach a Class (150 words)

If you could teach a class on any one thing, whether academic or otherwise, what would it be?

What Brown Admissions Is Actually Looking For

The most direct source on what Brown is evaluating is the admissions dean himself. He discusses Brown's evaluation criteria with more specificity than most deans at his level.

The phrase he returns to most consistently is “excellence in context.” In his statement following the admission of the Class of 2029, Powell described Brown's central criterion this way:

“We're looking for excellence in context: for students who have excelled in their environment, exceeded expectations, made the most of their opportunities, overcome obstacles, and who truly shined in their local setting.”

— Logan Powell, Dean of Admission, Brown University

That framing has direct consequences for every Brown supplemental essay. Brown is not looking for the most impressive resume. It is looking for evidence that you did something real with whatever access you had, and that you understand what you did and why.

Powell has also pushed back on the idea that Brown admits conventionally well-rounded students. He describes Brown as admitting students who are “well-lopsided” — deeply engaged with a smaller number of things. A student with one absorbing intellectual pursuit, chased with real commitment, is not at a disadvantage here.

On holistic review, Powell describes looking for students who can “bring together students from a wide array of perspectives to learn from each other” and who are prepared for “what the larger world throws at them.” The essays are where a student's voice, judgment, and self-awareness actually appear in the file. Everything else is data.

Understanding Brown's Open Curriculum Before You Write

Brown's Open Curriculum eliminates all general education requirements and lets students design their own course of study. It is the organizing principle of Brown's academic life, and no Brown supplement prompt makes full sense without understanding it.

The core logic: “the purpose of education for the undergraduate is to foster the intellectual and personal growth of the individual student.”

In practice, Brown students are the architects of their own education. There are no required general education courses. Students pursue one of eighty-plus concentrations for depth, but the shape of everything else is theirs to design. Brown believes that building a self-directed course of study is harder than following a prescribed curriculum. The students who do it well arrive already intellectually engaged, with interests they did not manufacture for an application.

How to Write the Brown Open Curriculum Essay (250 words)

“There is something distinctive about Brown students. It is a blend of intellectual curiosity, creativity, and humility. A commitment to collaboration. An openness to new ideas and perspectives. A desire to make the world better. And it is resilience: the ability to recover and thrive after experiencing difficulties.” — President Christina Paxson, 2025 Convocation Address. How will you use these characteristics or others to shape your approach to the Open Curriculum?

Quick Take — Brown Open Curriculum Essay

Word limit: 250 words

What it's evaluating: whether your intellectual character is genuine and whether you understand what it means to direct your own education

Top mistake: choosing one of Paxson's traits and simply claiming to have it

Key phrase: “or others” — you are not required to use her list

What Is the Brown Open Curriculum Essay Really Asking?

This prompt asks: what is your intellectual character, and how will it shape the way you build an education?

The Paxson quote lists seven traits: intellectual curiosity, creativity, humility, commitment to collaboration, openness, desire to make the world better, and resilience, but the prompt immediately says “or others.” That phrase matters. Brown is not asking you to pick a trait from a menu and claim it. It is inviting you to name whatever characteristic is genuinely yours and show how it will drive the way you design your own curriculum.

The most important word in the prompt is “use.” Brown is not asking you to describe yourself. It is asking what you will do with your character once you have freedom over your education. The Open Curriculum is a blank page. Students who arrive without real intellectual direction do not thrive here. This essay exists, in part, to find out whether you know what you would do with that blank page.

Naming a characteristic and grounding it in a real story takes self-knowledge. Connecting it to the structure of the Open Curriculum, not just its course catalog, requires the student to understand what it actually means to direct their own education. The admissions office can tell the difference between a student who has thought carefully about that freedom and one who is using it as a selling point.

What Makes a Strong Brown Open Curriculum Essay?

The strongest responses will do three things. First, they name a specific characteristic and make it concrete through a real story or pattern of behavior rather than asserting it in the abstract. Second, they explain how that characteristic shapes the way they pursue knowledge, not just what they're interested in. Third, they connect it to how they would use the Open Curriculum, what they would build, what path they would design, what kind of student they would be without requirements forcing them in a direction.

Mistakes To Avoid in the Brown Open Curriculum Essay

• Picking a trait from Paxson's list and simply claiming to possess it: “I've always been intellectually curious.”

• Describing the Open Curriculum as appealing without saying what you'd do with it.

• Trying to cover too many characteristics instead of developing one or two with real depth.

Brown Open Curriculum Essay Examples

Example 1: Humility as Method

The turning point in my research was the moment I realized my model was wrong in a way I had not designed it to be wrong. I had spent four months building a deep learning framework to predict crop yields from weather data, and when I tested it against county-level agricultural records, it performed worse on Arkansas counties than on counties with similar climate profiles elsewhere. I could not explain why.

What I did next — spending two weeks reading agricultural history I had not thought I needed, eventually finding that soil drainage patterns in the Mississippi Alluvial Plain differ systematically from how satellite-derived data represents them — is what I mean by humility as a working method. Not deference, and not self-doubt, but the discipline of staying curious about the thing that did not fit.

At Brown, that discipline becomes the architecture of my education. The Open Curriculum gives me something no prescribed course sequence does: the freedom to follow an anomaly. When my research raises a question outside my current concentration — into soil science, agricultural economics, or public policy — I will not need to file an exception or defer to a department's logic. I will be able to design the coursework that answers the actual question. That is how I intend to use four years: not as a sequence of requirements to clear, but as a system I build in response to what I still do not understand.

Why this example works: The essay grounds a characteristic — humility — in a specific research moment rather than asserting it. The connection to the Open Curriculum is structural: the freedom to follow anomalies across disciplinary lines. The student explains what they will use the curriculum for, not just why they appreciate it.

Example 2: Collaboration as Creative Pressure

Every piece I perform with the youth orchestra is a negotiation. Not with the conductor, but with the seventy instruments around me. I play first violin, which means I am responsible for producing a clean line — but what clean means changes depending on what the cellos are doing three rows back. Early on, I played too much of the piece alone in my head. Now I practice listening as deliberately as I practice technique. The quality of a single violin part depends on how carefully the player understands what they are part of.

I bring that orientation to everything I build. In my independent research on soybean yield modeling, the most useful feedback I received came from an agricultural economist who did not understand my neural network and a soil scientist who did not understand my statistical methods. Their confusion told me which assumptions I had not examined. I have learned to treat other people's frameworks as tests of my own, rather than obstacles to my conclusions.

At Brown, I plan to use the Open Curriculum to make that pressure structural. I want to design a course of study that keeps me in contact with disciplines that do not share my vocabulary — placing environmental science coursework alongside policy and economics rather than sequencing them as prerequisites. Brown's flexibility makes it possible to build an education around productive friction rather than one that narrows toward a single field before I know which questions I am actually trying to answer.

Why this example works: The essay earns the characteristic through two concrete examples — orchestra and research — before connecting to curriculum design. The Open Curriculum is treated as a structural tool, not a perk.

How to Write the Brown Growing Up Essay (250 words)

Students entering Brown often find that making their home on College Hill naturally invites reflection on where they came from. Share how an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you, and what unique contributions this might allow you to make to the Brown community.

Quick Take — Brown Growing Up Essay

Word limit: 250 words

What it's evaluating: formation AND contribution — both halves required

Top mistake: generic contribution claim: “I will bring a different perspective”

Key word: Aspect — one specific thing, not your whole biography

What Is the Brown Growing Up Essay Really Asking?

This prompt requires two things that have to work together: a specific account of something formative, and a clear case for what that means for the Brown community. Not your whole biography — one aspect of growing up that has shaped how you think, what you value, or what you bring into a room.

Brown defines diversity broadly. Powell has described wanting students from rural backgrounds, urban backgrounds, first-generation students, student veterans, students who attended Providence public schools — “students from every conceivable walk of life.” What ties them together is not background category but the ability to articulate what their specific formation means for how they engage with others intellectually.

The contribution language is where most Brown growing up essays break down. Students read it as requiring a promise of service or leadership. It does not. Contribution here means intellectual and cultural contribution: what does your background let you see, ask, challenge, or model that Brown would otherwise lack? The strongest essays do not announce contributions. They earn them through the specificity of the story itself.

What Makes a Strong Brown Growing Up Essay?

At 250 words, you have room for one thing, developed with enough specificity to feel real. Choose one aspect of your formation — the one most genuinely connected to how you think. Then be as specific about the contribution as you are about the experience. “I will bring a different perspective” is not a contribution. “Here is what I notice in a seminar that someone with my particular formation notices, and here is why” is.

Common Mistakes in the Brown Growing Up Essay

• Covering too much — summarizing your whole childhood instead of one specific aspect.

• Telling a moving story without connecting it to how you engage intellectually with others.

• Claiming a generic contribution: “I will bring diversity,” “I will offer a unique perspective.”

• Treating this as a hardship essay when it is a formation essay.

• Writing about identity or experience without saying what it means for Brown's learning environment.

Brown Growing Up Essay Examples

Example 1: Growing Up Bilingual in a Non-English-Speaking Household

I grew up translating. Not just my mother's medical forms and school permission slips, which I have been doing since the second grade, but something harder: the gap between what she was trying to say and what American institutions were willing to hear. By the time I was twelve, I understood that translation was not just a language problem. It was a power problem. What got through depended on who was asking and what they expected to receive.

That understanding has shaped everything I read and write. In my AP Language class last year, when we analyzed how the same event gets framed differently across news sources, I was not encountering this idea for the first time. I had been living it since early childhood. I notice register, I notice omission, I notice the choices that make some voices legible to institutions and others invisible.

At Brown, this attention will be useful in ways that extend beyond my own concentration. In seminars where students bring different frameworks to shared texts, I am the person who notices when a translation assumption is doing unexamined work. I have spent years thinking about who gets to define what counts as clear, correct, or credible. Brown's intellectual community benefits most from students who bring a specific way of seeing, not just a different background. This is mine.

Why this example works: The essay identifies a specific formation — childhood translation — and reasons outward to an intellectual habit and a genuine contribution. The contribution is shown through what the student notices, not announced in generic terms.

Example 2: Growing Up in a Small Rural Town

There is one stoplight in my town, and it was installed when I was in the sixth grade. My graduating class has twenty-seven people. The nearest public library is eighteen miles away. I am telling you this not to establish hardship but to explain that I became a reader the way you become an expert in anything when you have nothing but time and limited alternatives: completely.

I read everything in our school's library twice and started ordering books through interlibrary loan by the time I was fourteen. I taught myself basic programming from documentation and forums because there was no one to ask in person. I wrote for our county newspaper because there was no school paper. These are not exceptional accomplishments. They are what you do when you want to learn, and the infrastructure around you is thin. You build something from what is available.

At Brown, I will be in an environment where intellectual resources are dense rather than scarce, and I expect that will change how I work in ways I cannot fully predict. What I will bring is a specific orientation: I do not take access for granted. I know what it costs to get a question answered when no one nearby has the answer. I think this makes me a different kind of collaborator. I want to find out if I'm right.

Why this example works: The essay demonstrates intellectual formation from scarcity without performing victimhood. The contribution is specific — a particular orientation toward access and self-direction — and connects naturally to what the Open Curriculum's culture values.

How to Write the Brown Joy Essay (150 words)

Brown students care deeply about their work and the world around them. Students find contentment, satisfaction, and meaning in daily interactions and major discoveries. Whether big or small, mundane or spectacular, tell us about something that brings you joy.

Quick Take — Brown Joy Essay

Word limit: 150 words (reduced from 200-250 in prior years)

What it's evaluating: whether you have a genuine interior life that is not entirely instrumental

Top mistake: choosing a topic that duplicates the Open Curriculum essay

Impact of shorter limit: specificity matters more than ever — no room for scene-setting

What Changed: The Word Limit Dropped

The Joy essay needs to land quickly on the specific experience of joy. Focus on what it actually feels like to be inside it. When selecting a topic, choose something specific enough that a single concrete detail immediately makes the joy legible.

What Is the Brown Joy Essay Really Asking?

The Joy essay is asking whether you have a genuine relationship to pleasure, play, and meaning that is not organized entirely around achievement. It is the most distinctive prompt in the Brown supplement and it reaches something the other two essays cannot.

Powell has said repeatedly that Brown looks for authenticity. It wants students who share what they actually enjoy, not what they think Brown wants to hear. The prompt explicitly invites both big and small sources of joy, mundane and spectacular. An essay about the particular sound of a basketball net when the shot is perfect can work as well as one about a major intellectual discovery. Just be sure that the writing is specific and the joy is real.

What Makes a Strong Brown Joy Essay at 150 Words?

Start in the experience, not in the explanation. At this word count, there is no room for preamble. The strongest essays pick the one most specific, sensory detail about their source of joy and put it first, and then use the remaining words to say what that experience is actually like, and why it matters.

The topic should cover ground that the Open Curriculum and Growing Up essays have not already opened. If both of your other essays are about research and scientific thinking, joy that comes from cooking, woodworking, or reading old maps does more work for the application than joy that comes from tuning a data model.

Common Mistakes in the Brown Joy Essay

• Opening with background rather than the experience itself.

• Choosing a topic that mirrors the Open Curriculum essay instead of adding a new dimension.

• Describing joy in the abstract: “I love the feeling of discovery” rather than showing a specific moment of it.

• Picking a topic too broad to develop in 150 words.

Brown Joy Essay Examples

Example 1: Competitive Puzzle Design (150 words)

The moment I love most is not when someone solves the puzzle. It is the thirty seconds before they do. I can see it on their faces: the wrong path they have committed to, the variable they keep overlooking. And then something shifts. They look at the thing differently. The puzzle breaks open.

I design escape room puzzles for my school's annual fundraiser, and engineering that moment is the hardest creative problem I know. Every puzzle starts with one question: what assumption will they make, and how can I make that assumption feel inevitable until it suddenly isn't? It is cognitive psychology as much as game design.

I love this because the feedback is honest and immediate. Most intellectual work is not like that. When it is — when I can watch the solution land in real time — I am completely present in a way nothing else produces.

Why this example works: It starts in the specific moment rather than background. At 150 words, every sentence advances the experience. The intellectual character revealed here — designing for how people think — is distinct from an academic interests essay.

Example 2: Bread Baking (150 words)

It took me four months to get a reliable rise. The variables are genuinely difficult: hydration, ambient temperature, the health of the starter. I kept a lab notebook, which my family found absurd, but which eventually told me that my kitchen runs warmer in summer and that my starter peaks at seventy-two hours, not twenty-four.

I bake bread every Saturday morning not because it is useful but because it is the one hour of my week with no deadline and no grade. The feedback is the loaf itself. A dense crumb tells me something different than a collapsed crust. The process is endlessly instructive in a way that has nothing to do with whether anyone eats the result — though they usually do.

Saturday morning gives me something most of high school does not: a problem where the only judge is whether the thing works.

Why this example works: Specific, sensory, economical. The lab notebook detail does real work in three words. The final line earns its place without being clever about it.

How to Write the Brown Teach a Class Short Answer (150 words)

If you could teach a class on any one thing, whether academic or otherwise, what would it be?

Quick Take — Brown Teach a Class

Word limit: 150 words (increased from 100 in prior years)

What it's evaluating: self-knowledge, intellectual personality, and what you know that others don't

Impact of longer limit: you now have room for a course concept and a pedagogical argument

What Changed: More Room to Make a Case

At 150 words, Brown is giving you enough space to develop the course concept, explain what it would actually teach, and make the case for why you are the right person to teach it. Use all of the space.

How to Write the Brown Teach a Class Prompt

The strongest answers explain what the course is, what it would actually teach, and why you are the right person to teach it. The tone can be playful. Brown has a culture of creative, idiosyncratic course titles, and the prompt invites that energy.

The topic does not need to be academic. A course on the rhetorical structure of sports broadcast announcing, the chemistry of fermentation failure, or the history of typographic choices in protest signage tells Brown something that “Introduction to Neuroscience” does not. Ideally the topic opens a window into you that the two main essays have not already opened.

Brown Teach a Class Example (150 words)

The class is called “Failure Modes: A Field Guide to Wrong Answers.”

It would open with the history of scientific errors that turned out to be generative — phlogiston, the luminiferous ether, N-rays — and move toward contemporary disciplines where productive failure is built into the methodology: materials science, drug discovery, machine learning. The central question of the course is one most curricula never ask: how do you tell the difference between a dead end and a wrong turn?

The final project requires students to design an experiment specifically intended to produce a particular type of failure and document what they learned from it. Not what went wrong — what the failure revealed that success would have concealed.

I would teach this because I think most classes teach you how to succeed. Almost none teach you how to fail in a way that moves you forward. That gap is the class.

Why this example works: Specific title, a genuine course arc across three acts, a clear pedagogical argument. At 150 words, the student has room to develop the concept and close with a line that reveals intellectual character.

How the Brown Essays Work Together

Brown asks for more writing than most Ivy League schools, and that volume creates a potential problem: redundancy. The most common mistake in the Brown supplement is repeating the same material across essays. Your Open Curriculum essay, Growing Up essay, and Joy essay should each reveal a distinct dimension of who you are. If all three circle the same passion, formation, or topic, you have not used the space Brown gave you.

The short answer works the same way. The Teach a Class prompt should illuminate something the longer essays have implied but not stated directly.

Powell has described Brown as assembling students “from a wide array of perspectives to learn from each other.” The essays are not just telling your story. They are making the case that your story is worth being in the room with. The strongest Brown applications have a clear spine: this is who I am, this is what I have done, this is what I will bring. Every prompt is an opportunity to advance that argument with a different piece of evidence.

Brown Supplemental Essays: Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Brown University supplemental essay prompts for 2026–27?

Brown requires three essays and one short answer. The essays are: an Open Curriculum essay (250 words) asking how you will use your defining characteristics to shape your approach to Brown's Open Curriculum; a Growing Up essay (250 words) asking how an aspect of your background has shaped you and what contributions this might allow you to make to Brown; and a Joy essay (150 words) asking about something that brings you genuine satisfaction. The short answer is a Teach a Class prompt (150 words). The three-word self-description and one-sentence Why Brown prompts from prior years have been eliminated.

What changed from the 2025-26 Brown supplement?

Four changes. First, the Academic Interests essay has been replaced by a new Open Curriculum essay anchored to a Paxson quote about Brown student characteristics — a fundamentally different prompt focused on intellectual character rather than subject matter. Second, the Joy essay word limit dropped from 200-250 to 150 words. Third, the Teach a Class short answer word limit increased from 100 to 150 words. Fourth, the three-word self-description and one-sentence Why Brown prompts have both been eliminated.

What is the new Brown Open Curriculum essay asking?

It is asking what characteristics define your intellectual approach — whether from Paxson's list (curiosity, creativity, humility, collaboration, openness, desire to make the world better, resilience) or others of your own — and how you will use those characteristics to design your education through the Open Curriculum. The key phrase is “or others”: Brown is not asking you to pick a trait from her list. It is asking you to name whatever is genuinely yours and show how it will drive the way you build an education.

How is the new Open Curriculum essay different from the old Academic Interests essay?

The Academic Interests essay asked what subjects excite you and how you'd pursue them at Brown. The new prompt asks about intellectual character and how that character will shape the way you build an education. The old prompt was about content. The new one is about process and disposition. You can still reference academic interests, but they should serve the argument about who you are as a learner, not function as the primary subject of the essay.

What is the biggest mistake on the new Open Curriculum essay?

Picking one of Paxson's traits and simply claiming to have it: “I've always been intellectually curious.” Every applicant will do some version of this. The essay only works when the characteristic is grounded in a real story or specific pattern of behavior, and the connection to the Open Curriculum explains what you will actually do with that freedom, not just why you appreciate having it.

How long should the Brown Joy essay be now that the limit is 150 words?

Write to 150 words. At this length, the essay needs to land quickly on the specific experience of joy without setup. Choose a topic specific enough that a single concrete detail immediately makes the joy legible. A topic that requires explanation before it becomes interesting is the wrong topic at 150 words.

How should I use the extra 50 words in the Teach a Class prompt?

The Teach a Class prompt increased from 100 to 150 words. Use the additional room to move beyond naming a course and briefly justifying it. At 150 words, you have space to give the course a structure — an arc or argument — and to make an explicit case for why you are the right person to teach it. An answer that comes in at 110 words is leaving something useful out.

Has the Why Brown essay been eliminated?

Yes. The one-sentence Why Brown prompt (50 words) that appeared in the prior cycle's supplement has been eliminated for 2026–27.

Has the three-word self-description been eliminated?

Yes. The three-word self-description that appeared in the prior cycle's supplement has been eliminated for 2026–27.

What makes a good Brown supplemental essay?

Specificity and coherence across all three responses. Each essay should reveal something about you that the others do not, and all three together should add up to a recognizable person. Brown is reading for students who have excelled in their specific context, who have genuine intellectual interests, and who bring real character to their applications. Essays that gesture toward those things without grounding them in anything concrete tend to read as exactly what they are.

What topics should I avoid in the Brown supplemental essays?

In the Open Curriculum essay, avoid listing Paxson's characteristics and claiming to embody them without grounding them in real stories or behavior. In the Growing Up essay, avoid generic contribution claims and hardship narratives without intellectual reflection. In the Joy essay, avoid topics that duplicate your Open Curriculum essay and avoid describing joy abstractly rather than experientially. Across all essays, avoid language that could apply to any selective university without modification.

When are the Brown supplemental essays due?

For Early Decision applicants, the deadline is November 1. For Regular Decision applicants, the deadline is January 5. Confirm current deadlines on Brown's official admissions website before submitting.

What is the difference between the Brown supplement and the PLME supplement?

All Brown applicants complete the same three main essays and one short answer. PLME applicants additionally complete a 500-word personal motivation essay and a 250-word essay responding to one of two medicine-specific prompts. The PLME essays are evaluated by the PLME committee rather than the general admissions office, and the bar for specificity about medicine as a vocation — not just a career goal — is substantially higher than in the standard supplement.

How many essays does Brown require in total?

Four written responses: three essays (Open Curriculum, Growing Up, and Joy) and one short answer (Teach a Class), in addition to the Common Application personal statement. PLME and Brown-RISD Dual Degree applicants complete additional program-specific essays.

Does the Brown Open Curriculum essay count as a “why Brown” essay?

Not exactly. The Open Curriculum essay does require you to engage specifically with Brown's Open Curriculum, so it has a why-Brown dimension. But its real subject is your intellectual character and how you would use that freedom, not a list of Brown's features. An essay that only praises the Open Curriculum without showing what you would do with it misreads the prompt.