David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

nineteenth-century neighborhood of
redbrick Georgian and Colonial
buildings on the top of a gently sloping
hill. It might be the most beautiful
college campus in the United States. She
applied to Brown, with the University of
Maryland as her backup. A few months
later, she got a letter in the mail. She
was in.
“I expected that everyone at Brown
would be really rich and worldly and
knowledgeable,” she says. “Then I got
there, and everybody seemed to be just
like me—intellectually curious and kind
of nervous and excited and not sure
whether they’d be able to make friends.
It was very reassuring.” The hardest part
was choosing which courses to take,