Is Brown or Amherst better for undergraduate research opportunities?

For the widest range of research labs, equipment, and project areas, Brown has the edge. Its research-university setting gives undergraduates access to faculty laboratories across the sciences, engineering, public health, social sciences, and humanities, and programs such as Undergraduate Teaching and Research Awards can support student-faculty work. For the most consistently close, direct faculty mentorship from the beginning of college, Amherst is often the more favorable environment.

Brown suits a student who wants to explore a specialized or interdisciplinary research interest, especially one that may require substantial lab infrastructure or connections to graduate-level research. The Open Curriculum can make it easier to build an unusual combination of coursework around that interest, and students can seek mentors beyond a single department. The tradeoff is that some labs, particularly popular STEM labs, may include graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and many undergraduates, so initiative matters in securing a substantive role.

Amherst suits a student who values small classes, minimal graduate-student competition, and the chance to work closely with a professor whose primary institutional focus is teaching undergraduates. Faculty-led summer research and thesis work can be especially accessible, and the Five College Consortium expands course and faculty connections beyond Amherst itself. Research may be less extensive in scale than at Brown, particularly for highly specialized lab-based fields, but an Amherst student can often gain meaningful responsibility earlier.