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Ivy Huang

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Uijin Cho May Fujita Noah Kesselman Rohan Kher Zachary Miller Dayna Phan
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Ari Birnbaum Caleb Ellenberg Annum Hashmi
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A look into the most popular courses at Brown

The Herald’s Data Desk tracked the most popular courses and professors on Courses@Brown from 2016 to 2026.

Media by Scout Chen.

Have you investigated?

PROF 1200

The professors who have taught the most students in the past decade.

TIME 0740

Charts of when students are in class each day of the week.

REQS 2780D

The 25 courses that are often prerequisites.

As a pre-medical biochemistry concentrator, Bao Trinh ’27 has taken seven of the 30 most popular courses at Brown: APMA 1650: “Statistical Inference I,” BIOL 0800: “Principles of Physiology,” CHEM 0330: “Equilibrium, Rate and Structure,” BIOL 0280: “Biochemistry,” PHYS 0030: “Basic Physics A,” PHYS 0040: “Basic Physics B” and MATH 0100: “Single Variable Calculus, Part II.”

Among the most popular courses, odds are that students who have taken one have taken multiple.

The Herald’s Data Desk tracked the most popular courses by enrollment on Courses@Brown from 2016 to 2026. Whether it’s ECON 0110 or CHEM 0330, one thing is clear: Brown’s top courses are in STEM and economics.

ECON 0110: “Principles of Economics”

Among all courses at Brown, Principles of Economics sits at the top, with 7,062 enrollments from 2016 to 2026.

The course is a “gateway” to economics for students who have little knowledge about the field, said Teaching Professor of Economics Rachel Friedberg, who usually teaches the course.

“I think a lot of faculty prefer to teach upper-level classes that are closer to their specialty, or with students where they don’t have to start from the beginning, but the beginning is actually my favorite part,” Friedberg said.

The course’s popularity is in part due to the perception that it is a “good class to take if you want to make money,” or “be successful in life,” Associate Teaching Professor of Economics Alex Poterack said. In addition, having basic economics knowledge is useful for understanding the world, Poterack said.

“No matter what our academic interests or backgrounds, we all live in the economy,” Friedberg said.

Serene Kim ’28, who is concentrating in public health, decided to take ECON 0110 when she was still figuring out her concentration as the course was listed among the requirements for all the concentrations she was considering. But having never taken an economics class before, ECON 0110 ended up being a “good introduction” to the field.

Gizelle Rodriguez ’28, a business economics concentrator, initially planned to follow a pre-medical path. Coming from a first-generation background, Rodriguez said that health care was always emphasized to her as a field to pursue. But after taking Principles of Economics for “fun,” she switched her concentration plans and decided to “branch out” and try finance.

Friedberg and Poterack are both among the 30 most popular professors by enrollment, with Friedberg amassing 6,363 enrollments and Poterack tallying 2,459.

“Friedberg really cares about her students,” Rodriguez said. “She often connects what we learn to life lessons” and discusses how other courses might “build off of the content that she teaches.”

ECON 1710: “Investments I”

ECON 1710: “Investments I” sits at number 14 among the most-enrolled classes at Brown. To take the course, students must first take ECON 1110: “Intermediate Microeconomics” or ECON 1130: “Intermediate Microeconomics (Mathematical),” among other prerequisites.

“There are a lot of students who take this as the only finance class they take, and they’re happy with that,” said Teaching Professor of Economics Sylvia Kuo.

When Kuo first started teaching the course in 2012, she noticed a significant gender disparity.

“I basically would come in, and the classes were really full of guys,” Kuo said. But “over time, I’ve managed to get the representation of women equal to that of the concentration,” which is approximately one-third women and two-thirds men.

Knowing that finance can be an “exclusionary” field, “I wanted to make investments … a safe space and (an) inclusive space,” Kuo said. “I wanted this to be a place where you could come … and you could say, ‘Professor, I still don’t know what a stock is.’”

Kuo recently shifted to administering evening exams, where students first work individually for 50 minutes before completing a subset of the same assessment in groups of four. This setup allows students to learn from one another, Kuo said.

The first time Kuo implemented this exam format, there was so much “buzz” and engagement from students that people who weren’t in the course were standing outside the doors of Sayles Auditorium, “trying to figure out what party they were missing.”

The course comprises students from different academic backgrounds — from applied math and computer science concentrators who are “very mathematical,” to business economics concentrators who are “more on the practical side.” While addressing the learning needs of this mix can be hard, this challenge is actually one of Kuo’s favorite aspects of teaching the course.

“I like that (investments) is a daunting subject, and I want to make it accessible for everybody,” Kuo said. “I want it to be empowering, where people feel like they understand enough about how to deal with investments that they don’t have to” hire someone else to handle their finances,” she added.

ENGN 0090: “Management of Industrial and Nonprofit Organizations”

ENGN 0090: “Management of Industrial and Nonprofit Organizations” is another popular course and is one of the two core requirements for the entrepreneurship certificate. The course’s instructor, Professor of the Practice of Engineering Thano Chaltas ’87 P’24, is the eighth most popular professors by enrollment.

Chaltas attributes the course’s popularity to its content and applicability to business school, which centers on management, including strategy, marketing, finance, operations, organization and behavior.

“We are essentially giving students exposure to the most foundational concepts in the study of how organizations work,” Chaltas said.

Chaltas also attributes the course’s popularity to Professor Emeritus of Engineering Barrett Hazeltine, who taught Chaltas when he was an undergraduate student at Brown.

“Professor Hazeltine is the most impactful faculty member in Brown history,” Chaltas said. “The most common compliment I heard people give to Professor Hazeltine would be things along the lines of, ‘He believed in me before I believed in myself.’”

Rodriguez, who took ENGN 0090, said she appreciated how “enthusiastic” the professors were and how “interactive” the class was.

Chaltas returned to Brown in 2017 to co-teach the course with Hazeltine, and now that he has taken over the course, “it’s the full circle moment,” Chaltas said.

MATH 0520: “Linear Algebra”

As the third most popular course with 5,146 enrollments, the content taught in MATH 0520: “Linear Algebra” will “rewire your brain,” said Jordan Kostiuk, a senior lecturer in mathematics who teaches the course. The course is a requirement for many STEM concentrations, such as math and computer science.

“The topics that you learn in a foundational linear algebra course are used in different ways in different courses,” said Kostiuk. “Linear Algebra is one of the first math courses that a student starts … proving and conjecturing and organizing their thought web in their own way.”

While some students take the course “mostly because it is a requirement,” Kostiuk has noticed that more “humanities and undeclared students” have taken the course over the last three years. “It used to be around 5%, now it’s like 10 or 11%,” he said.

In fall 2022, Kostiuk introduced a team-based learning model for the course where students “are doing the problem solving in class” instead of just listening to lectures.

“Math, for me, is messy, it’s creative, it’s inquiry driven,” Kostiuk said. “I felt strongly that students at Brown would have fun doing math if I just figured out a way to get out of the way and let them do math.”

Associate Professor Emeritus Tom Doeppner and the popularity of computer science

Associate Professor Emeritus of Computer Science Tom Doeppner, who is the sixth most popular professor by enrollment, has taught CSCI 0330: “Introduction to Computer Systems” and CSCI 1670: “Operating Systems.”

The reason “a lot of our students are coming into the concentration in the first place is that they really like projects,” said Doeppner, who has not held exams since the pandemic. “In this course, your grade is entirely based upon how you do in projects,” he said.

Based on the feedback Doeppner received from his students — both through course evaluations and personally — “they found the projects tough, but they found them very rewarding, and they enjoyed doing them,” he added.

The popularity of pre-med and adjacent courses

Of the 30 most popular courses, 14 are prerequisites for most medical school applications or are related to the field.

Trinh — the student who has taken seven of the 30 most popular courses — has also taken CHEM 0350: “Organic Chemistry I” with Professor of Chemistry Matthew Zimmt, the fifth most popular professor by enrollment.

Trinh attributed Zimmt’s popularity to CHEM 0350 and CHEM 0360 being required for many students studying a variety of STEM concentrations and on the pre-med track.

“I think he’s actually very good at teaching concepts the way you would understand,” he added.

Wil Tullo ’28, who is studying biochemistry and molecular biology, has taken six of the top 30 most popular courses: PHP 0310: “Health Care in the United States,” CHEM 0330, PHYS 0030, PHYS 0040, MATH 0100 and BIOL 0280.

Out of these courses, Tullo “really enjoyed Biochemistry” content-wise and found “parts of Healthcare in the (United States) that were interesting.”

“Most of these courses, because they were prerequisites for a lot of my later courses, I wouldn't necessarily consider them my favorite courses that I’ve taken,” Tullo said. “Personally, (speaking) as both a chem student and a chemistry tutor, a lot of students take it just because they’re required to.”

Kim, who has also taken PHP 0310, took the course as it was an introductory class for concentrations she was considering at the time. The course is taught by Professor of Medicine and of Health Services, Policy and Practice and of Medicine Ira Wilson, who is also one of the most popular professors in terms of enrollment.

“He has a physician background, so it was really interesting hearing his real-life examples with his patients,” Kim said.

Humanities departments feature the most turnover in courses

Many of Brown’s humanities departments were not represented in the most popular courses and professors. Instead, these departments experiment with a revolving door of courses.

The Department of English ranked first in unique courses, or courses with codes that have not been previously offered.

“In departments where there are required categories of courses … but not required courses … to complete the concentration, there is a lot more flexibility for faculty to develop new courses as their interests change,” Seth Rockman — a professor of history and the department’s director of undergraduate studies — wrote in an email to The Herald. “This results in many new classes and also many courses that no longer get taught.”

In practice, this can mean that “a course that a faculty member might have taught 2016-2021 gets replaced with a new course about whatever they are thinking about now,” Rockman wrote. In Rockman’s view, this can be beneficial because “students get exposed to the cutting edge in the discipline because more faculty are teaching their own research rather than other people’s research.”

“The English department, like many departments at Brown, is very creative and very dynamic,” Professor and Chair of English Richard Rambuss said. “Professors tend to really want to teach new and updated courses based on what their current interests are, including the very research that they’re doing.”

Rambuss added that sometimes professors take into account what they hear students are interested in.

“I think myself and my colleagues very much enjoy sharing our research as we're doing it, not only with our graduate students, but also with our undergraduate students,” he added.