This is not the kind of ranking you’d usually expect to hear about Brown. We’re used to #1 douchiest or #5 most stressful, things like that. But, believe it or not, graduateprograms.com – the sites with self-descriptive names are always the sketchy ones – has ranked us 2nd in the country for our graduate engineering program. Graduateprograms.com, which, according to Brown Engineering’s website, may or may not also be known as graduatestudents.com, put us only .1 “stars” behind leader Cornell – BOOOOO – and ahead of traditional leaders in the field such as M.I.T. and Carnegie Mellon. Just a few years after the creation of the undergrad engineering school, it seems the program as a whole is doing quite well.

This award, however, might not be the most important discovery of the day. Brown Engineering’s site has also taken the single most misleading flattering picture of Barus & Holley that could ever be imagined (see above). To the genius photographer responsible for this: PLEASE find us a similar angle for the Scili Desert.

Image via. 

Looks like Consent Day and FemSex are doing something right.

Trojan Sexual Health released its 7th annual Sexual Health Report Card this week, (boy, that must have been an awkward parent-teacher conference), and Brown came in at second in the nation, up two spots from 2011, out of a total of 141 universities.

We came in under University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, (who knew?) and right above Columbia. Suck it (consensually and safely), Lions!

Schools were graded on five categories, each out of 10 points. We’ve got full marks on sexual assault services, and we got 8s on STD testing, contraceptives, and condoms (clearly they’ve never tried getting rubbers from RCs’ doors midway through a semester).

Let’s keep it up guys—all we have to do is get through Halloweekend and SPG.

HuffPo published its list of LGBT friendly colleges yesterday via Unigo, and Brown came in at a fabulous number 4.

Let’s be honest: Nobody’s really surprised.

We have a rainbow flag hanging on the Main Green. We counter-protest. We’re the school with a badass Queer Alliance that throws SPG, hosted IvyQ last year, and generally makes the campus a delicious alphabet soup of queer activism.

It is nice to get the recognition, especially since this is up from last year’s Daily Beast rating, which put us at a paltry 9.

(Plus, we’re the only Ivy to make the list. While we shouldn’t be petty—suck that, New Haven!)

­And by the way, HuffPo, it’s LGBTQ. Let’s be inclusive here.

Yeah, OK, so we knew that already. Whatever. But isn’t it nice to get some positive reinforcement once in a while?

Men’s Health magazine went out in the field, got its hands dirty and rated the best college beer bars across the United States. Our beloved Grad Center Bar made the cut for both its “uniqueness” and its beer list.

Unsurprisingly, HuffPost College decided to make a pretty slideshow to supplement these ratings… or, more likely, to give road-tripping inebriates planning to hit all 20 bars some clear, unambiguous visual aids for their respective journeys. The GCB is the first bar listed on that slideshow, but not to worry — this exposure doesn’t necessarily mean that our favorite clandestine bar will be invaded by tourists in the near future. Looks like HuffPost College is trying to help a bro out and keep the location of GCB under wraps. The GCB’s so legit that it even has its own decoy.

Robinson Hall? Really, HuffPost? Econ isn’t thaaat much of a joke at Brown. OK, so maybe not the best decoy. But we still envision several impending “this isn’t where I parked my car” interactions with Prof. Friedberg & Co… and perhaps some lessons in Beerconomics. Lesson one: Beer and pizza are perfect complements.