Posted in Admissions
Last Minute Decision-Makers: This Post Is For You!
Everyone told me senior year would go fast, but I didn’t think it would go this fast. It seems like just a few weeks ago that I received my acceptance, but in reality it’s been over 4 months. We’ve already welcomed many new classmates from EDII and RD, and plenty more are at Jumbo Days right now trying to make their final decisions.
The Class of 2016 Facebook page has positively exploded with new students finding others with common academic interests, sports, and hobbies. It’s already easy to tell that the Admissions Committee did a fantabulous job of bringing a diversity of personalities, experiences, and strengths together to form Tufts ’16.
If you’re on the fence about Tufts, for whatever reason, and if you don’t have the ability to go to Jumbo Days to help you make up your mind, I recommend you glance through our Facebook page or read some essays from admitted students of the class of ’16. You might find that it’s with the lively, unique, and talented people of Tufts ’16 that you...
On Watching Baby Jumbos
After a little lag time to let the new class of 2016 try to figure things out, I joined the facebook group to see if there were any questions that I could answer or a jumbo I could host. When I was in the same position as many of you are in now, I was wary of joining the group. It can be scary inserting yourself into a group of perfect strangers, but ultimately it turned out well.
Now, if any of you are from 2015, you know how great that group was, and I'm happy to say, still is. We all chatted in threads, on huge skype conversations, and in person at various meet ups around the US and in other countries. We learned about each other and it got to the point where nobody had any shame about acting a little silly. Midway through the summer, a whole group of people had changed their profile pictures to muppets characters (I snatched up Beaker ASAP) and proceeded to post whole conversations on a fellow Jumbo's wall just so that it would look like Sesame Street had...
What Makes You Tick? (From Jumbo Days 2011)
Last year, I was asked to answer the question that every applicant to Tufts was asked: "What makes you tick?" Simple enough, right? Food, water, umm... well... ok, maybe not so simple. Especially when you're representing the Tufts freshman class at Jumbo Days (when it was still called April Open House... oh, so long ago...). Well, it's that time of year again, so I thought I'd post my speech to give you a taste of what you'll be hearing from this year's awesome speakers!
Before I can say what makes me tick, I have to ask the question: what is my tick? This isn't such a simple question to answer – humans are complicated, and we don't produce a single sound or motion, like a clock. We do have components, though: we have brains, organs, and we have hands – just a different kind.
My tick, my output, is the whole range of ideas, connections, concepts, and actions that I can produce, as Evan Moulson, as a human being, and as a member of the Tufts community.
That's getting kind of complicated. Let's condense it. If you were a clock, what would your tick look like? In my case, my “tick” happens to be a near-constant stream of economic policy debates, Princess Bride quotes, and Star Warstrivia.
TICK! Eliminating capital gains tax is a terrible idea because it only lowers effective tax rates for the rich. TICK! “I see you are using Bonetti's Defense against me.” “I thought it fitting, considering the rough terrain.” TICK! The Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs – which is a measure of distance – because it used spacetime to its advantage and flew close to the Maw cluster of black holes.
That's actually pretty typical of a Tufts student's version of “tick-tock.”
Evan’s Reasons to Love Tufts #3: The Department of Admitted Students
All colleges have an admissions department. Heck, the high school on whose property I'm staying over spring break has an admissions department that I walked by this morning.
But only Tufts has an (unofficial) “Department of Admitted Students” within the “Department of Admissions.”
Huh?
Yeah.
At some schools, the admissions officers admit you and move on to the next class; at Tufts, they admit you, then email you blog posts, Facebook friend you, and check up on you – all the way to graduation. They even tell you when especially awesome new first years are being accepted (here’s a secret: we’re a lot more excited to meet you than you are to meet us, we just act “cool” because we’re afraid you won’t like us).
Plus, because the admissions officers are always travelling (here’s a sample tweet from Dan Grayson: “I'm a little obsessed with the Thai school system, so I spend as much time as I can visiting the schools.”) they have great stories about all the different corners of the globe...