Tufts Blogs

(The following is the extended text of my welcome to the Class of 2016 at Tufts' Matriculation Ceremony.)

Hello, friends.

“Let your life speak,” we asked each of the 16,379 applicants to the Class of 2016, and you did. A philosophy major from Orange County offered a memorable introduction. "Right now,” he said, “I'm a tree-hugging quixotic agnostic who believes in aliens, but who knows how long that will last." Indeed.

Sometimes a few words illuminated your personal vibe:

• “I’m a 6'6” ceramicist and the benchwarmer for varsity basketball.”

• "As a gay ginger I am insanely sassy."

• “I am a fusion and a paradox, a descendent of slaves, samurai and Holocaust survivors."

• “I'm a poet in a lab coat.”

• "My name is Tanner. I am a Cherokee. My family is the Bird Clan."

You celebrated your many talents—“I am a ferocious, fearless and phenomenal skinny dipper”—as well as your heritage—“I am the progeny of Reggae songs and African-American soul food." A California engineer sighed, “As a tall, avid theater fanatic with a low singing voice at an all-girls school, I’ve been cast as a boy in most of my school's productions,” while a newspaper editor proclaimed "I am logophile and a verbivore…who collects words the way I used to collect Halloween candy." Not surprisingly, she plans to major in English. I hope she meets up with the gal from Malibu who won 2nd place on Wheel of Fortune and the nationally ranked Scrabble player from Brookline. And then there’s the Mainer who invents swear words... 

I like to say it’s cool to be smart and your emerging interests in topics like hermaphroditic snails, the Napoleonic wars, big band swing music, pneumatic cannons, sustainable urban agriculture, yogurt, Norwegian Libertarianism, and bee colony collapse disorder back up that idea. The “We Can Change the World” finalist created a cell that uses mud-borne bacteria to capture energy while others have patents-pending for inventions as different as lip gloss and a gear that provides enhanced traction for four-wheel drive vehicles in mud and sand. An anthropologist from Seoul translates Korean folktales and posts them on-line to address homesickness among her peers studying overseas while an astronomy buff from Austin told us “I talk so much about special relativity and the Large Hadron Collider that I cleared an entire table of teenage boys."

We asked you to describe the environment in which you were raised and, as usual, you celebrated places as different as “deep East Texas,” a converted barn in suburban Connecticut, a grocery store in the Bronx and refugee camps in Rwanda and Afghanistan. You hail from Easley, South Carolina and Stillwater, Minnesota; from Moscow, Russia and Moscow, Idaho; from Falls Church, Virginia and Temple City, Maryland. You represent 46 American states (including four Alaskans, the first to enroll at Tufts since 2006), D.C., Puerto Rico and 37 nations, and your hometowns stretch from Provincetown, Massachusetts to Kapaau, Hawaii, from Budapest to Panama City to Nanjing. In fact, 32 of you are citizens of the People’s Republic of China, the largest contingent from any country outside the U.S.

Montana’s Statewide Volunteer of the Year for the Obama campaign grew up in “a drafty 1890s house” while a blogger who highlights Hanoi’s best street vendors was raised by her grandparents in the heart of the city’s Old Quarter. You chronicled life in Westchester County’s “suburban bubble,” on a commune in Vermont “where we poop in holes and we're proud of it," and in a 500-square foot apartment where a family of five rotated between two beds and the floor each night. A school mascot reported, "I come from a neighborhood where it's a feat just to finish high school" while the cross country captain from Ladysmith, Wisconsin announced, “My life can point out the differences between an Ayshire and a Swiss cow."

A crooning Eagle Scout confessed, "My family will attest that I became intolerable once I discovered my falsetto." (Apologies to his roommate…) You are the children of a Grand Slam tennis champion and a blackjack dealer at a Connecticut casino; of a “Castro-raised mother and a left-wing Cape Verdean dad who met in communist Russia,” of a copy editor for the LA Times, a Korean pastor in Texas, the mayor of Honolulu and the manager of a Boston-area McDonald’s. One of your fathers was murdered when you were eight; another survived the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

141 freshmen are first-generation college bound while, on the other side of the educational spectrum, a baker’s dozen are the children of Tufts faculty and 93 are the sons and daughters of Tufts alumni. That includes the fourth-generation Jumbo whose father proposed to his mother on the roof of Tisch Library and the double legacy from New Jersey who carried ”a tattered little Jumbo” on her backpack since 3rd grade. “Subconsciously, it's always been Tufts,” she confided.

Say hello to the street performer from Tokyo and a child actor in “The Royal Tenebaums,” the rapping nano-chemist from Philly and the Linux fanboy from Brockton, Mass. The new class features a gardener from Bangkok who develops pepper seed cultivars in search of "the hottest pad krapao gai the world has ever seen” and a quarterback named to ESPN’s “Players to Watch List.”

We salute Bulgaria’s National Youth Champion in tennis; the Grammy nominee for Best New Artist of 2010, New Mexico’s “We The People” State Champion, 58 National Merit Scholars and 2008’s “Most Philosophical 8th Grader in America.” A top-ranked nanny from Cameroon and 72 other high school valedictorians arrived today. So did a sponsored surfer from Hawaii, a beekeeper from Oregon, a flamenco dancer from Quito, a hipster columnist from DC and “the Nigerian Dr. Phil” (he’s reported to be an excellent listener…). Also making their Jumbo debuts are two-thirds of a set of Turkish triplets, a Ghanaian baker and a model from Boise, a glassblower from Utah and an agility dog trainer from San Francisco.

Look for the poet laureate and timpanist from New Jersey with an affinity for red Chuck Taylors; the makeup consultant for Seventeen Magazine; the “organic hippie” from Calgary; and the Mohawked, 6'4', 270-pound offensive lineman from Harlem. And let’s not forget the student voted “Never Wrong” by his classmates at Alaska’s Sitka High School, the "Most Likely to Capture the Moment" winner from Long Island’s Herricks Senior High, and Westborough High’s superlative runner-up for “Most Likely To Be Carded Until He’s 35.”

The unlikely historical duo of PT Barnum and Paul Revere would surely appreciate the enrollment of the unicyclist from Lexington and the circus juggler from Concord. “There is nothing more enjoyable than juggling things that are either sharp or on fire,” the latter reports. And let’s not overlook the puppeteer from Jersey, the mime from Maine or the pyrotechnic graphic design artist whose family has designed firework displays for five generations. (I hear she’s a sparkler.)

The Admissions Committee was impressed by the cool-under-pressure aura of the combat engineer with the Singaporean Air Force’s explosive ordinance & disposal unit as well as the daredevil vibe of the extreme cowboy racer from LA. (Dude.) We were intrigued by the New Yorker who performs with a Finnish cello metal band (I can’t even imagine what that sounds like, but maybe I’m just getting old…); the mechanical engineer who compared the bearing load of a Gothic buttress to the arch of her Jimmy Choo stilettos; and the child development major who studies The Wizard of Oz for references to the Farmer's Populist Movement. And then there’s the drama/music major who wrote and recorded an a capella song set to Green Eggs & Ham that has over 60,000 views on You Tube. He’s currently writing a musical about cows called "The Moosical.” Maybe he’ll make it into a moo-vie?

Thailand’s Usjima Vittayaamnuaykoon owns the longest name in the freshman class while Connecticut’s Qi Yan has the shortest. Twenty-two men sport a suffix, with Rolph V and Pierre VI boasting the most enduring generational longevity. Alex and Sarah are the most popular names in the Class of ’16 while Xiomara wins “Most Original” (because any name that begins with an X is kind of cool...).

In addition to the obvious info, your applications sometimes revealed unusual tidbits about you:

• “I have a hyper-sense of smell and a gag reflex more active than Vesuvius.” (And you thought we just cared about SAT scores…)

• "Sometimes, I hop on one foot as I attempt to put on clothes and read at the same time because the story is simply too good to be left untold."

• A Long Islander gets “a special bliss” when Marvin Gaye sings 'Let's Get It On' because "it defines the category of sensual jam." (I’m blushing.)

• A Chicagoan sported knee-length hair until she was 16 because she couldn’t cut it until she celebrated her quincetera.

• And not one but two of you (inexplicably...) confided a “journalistic crush” on NPR’s Ira Glass.

And props to the gal from Annapolis who offered this cheeky explanation about why she skipped the optional essay on the Tufts supplement: "Oh, those poor admission officers who read essay after essay from November to March. Oh the pain, the agony they live through, I just couldn’t add to their misery.” I told you: it really was optional…

We wondered, “Why Tufts?” The Student Council President from Natick High called Tufts “the perfect fusion of doers and dreamers,” while a pre-med from New Bedford, Mass. observed “it’s a place where comedy meets intellectual inquisitiveness, where hungry minds meet hungrier engineers."

But perhaps my favorite response came from the Connecticut gal who sighed, “Tufts has everything a girl could ever dream of having: brains, beauty, brawn and Boston."

On behalf of my colleagues in Undergraduate Admissions, welcome to Tufts, my friends.