Brown Deferred You: Now What?
Submit a letter of continued interest ideally by Wednesday, the 17th, and afterward, have your guidance counselor call or at least email the admissions office to update them concerning all of your awards, publications, accomplishments, and grades since you applied. They should affirm that no matter what other admission decisions you receive, you will choose to attend Brown if offered a spot. But not just any letter of continued interest. This letter should be one of the most inspired pieces of writing you've ever composed. In it, you need to let your heart write a love song for Brown and translate that into giving the reader a concrete picture of exactly who you will be as a person on College Hill. This includes demonstrating how you will contribute to spaces and organizations on campus and reminding the reader of your academic hook. In reintroducing your hook, the academic niche you spent time and effort carving out in high school to distinguish yourself from others, you want to remind the reader why you are someone who will thrive within Brown's Open Curriculum.
Ensure the letter is addressed to your regional admissions officer. When it comes to bragging about grades, prizes, or publications, please save it. If you made it this far in the admissions process at an elite school like Brown, then you already have enough academic credentials to be a strong candidate for Brown. If you did not, then you wouldn't be deferred and reevaluated in the Regular Decision round, you would have been rejected. Your guidance counselor should be the one bragging on your behalf. When they do it, it carries much more weight and shows the colleges that there is something beyond those accomplishments to consider. By your guidance counselor going out of their way to share your accomplishments with the admissions officer, it demonstrates to them that there is something compelling enough about your personhood for them to be doing this.
Given how accomplished you must be to be even deferred from an Ivy League school in 2025, this intangible quality they can infer is what will distinguish you from other overachievers. If you'd like help writing your letter of continued interest for Brown or any other school, please schedule a free consultation with us below.
After a lighthearted and positive introduction, I would then proceed to talk to the reader about something related to your niche, such as a new cutting-edge development or something new that you learned. I would then connect this new piece of information regarding your niche to something currently going on at Brown and explain how, by leveraging certain opportunities there, you can achieve some goal, and make the reader understand how achieving this goal can change the world. Brown's Open Curriculum is unlike any other Ivy League school, there are no core requirements outside of your chosen concentration, meaning you are the architect of your own education. Show the admissions committee that you understand what this freedom means and that you're ready to embrace it. Brown isn't looking for students who need structure imposed upon them; they want intellectual risk-takers who will chart their own course.
Afterward, I would paint them a picture of you on their campus. Have fun here. Feel free to write a hypothetical scenario of you making some of the best memories of your life there. You want the reader to feel like by not admitting you, they will be denying you the opportunity to live your best life for four years. Show them you doing activities that have garnered you friends in high school on their campus. Imagine yourself grabbing coffee at Blue State on Thayer Street, studying late nights at the Rock, walking through the Van Wickle Gates at Convocation, or collaborating with classmates on independent research. Make them see you as already belonging to the Brown community.
If you'd like help writing your letter of continued interest for Brown or any other school, please schedule a free consultation with us below.
