When I started looking at colleges, I didn’t know what I wanted. The only things I really knew were that I wanted to have a radio show and that I wanted to study abroad. The radio has totally lived up to the expectations I had for it in high school. However, after a few years of taking for granted that I would study in a different country, I decided that I would rather stay on campus for all four years.
This is in no way an argument against going abroad in general – all the upperclassmen I’ve spoken to who went abroad absolutely loved it. In fact, the only regret I’ve heard reported is from people who went for only one semester and wished they had stayed for a whole year. Nevertheless, it’s no longer an experience I feel the need to have. Here’s why:
1. The only Tufts programs I was considering were Tufts in Madrid and Tufts in Chile (having taken Spanish since the 6th grade, I wanted to finally become fluent). While planning my abroad application, I looked through the courses offered at University of Alcalá, Autonomous University of Madrid and University of Chile. A lot of stuff looked really great. But everything I found myself drawn to was related to Anthropology (my major). The reason I’m majoring in Anthropology is because I find every course in the department at Tufts fascinating. Did I need to travel across an ocean to study a subject that I already know is done so well here? I weighed the abroad courses with the Tufts courses and decided the answer was no.
2. I’m planning on writing a senior thesis in Anthropology. Both of my minors also require some sort of senior capstone project. That’s going to require a fair bit of work during my final year, so I’d like to be able to focus on those things alone rather than worry about balancing those concerns with last-minute course requirements. The way things look right now, if I stay on campus my junior year, I’ll have taken care of all the classes I need to graduate before my senior year. This probably wouldn’t necessarily have been the case if I went abroad. Now I’ll be able to put more time into those senior projects, and it won’t hurt to pre-empt a case of senioritis by lightening the amount of coursework I’ll be tempted to neglect.
All told, this one’s the primary reason:
One night, I took a cab back to campus from Boston. I told the driver I was going to Medford.
“What part of Medford?,” he asked.
I’m a second-semester sophomore, so it isn’t like I just got here. But I might as well have been a first-semester freshman, because I had no idea.
Thankfully the cab driver was able to find his way back to my dorm, but I was pretty humbled by how little I know about the immediate vicinity. I had thought of myself as having debunked the idea of the “Tufts bubble” since I venture off campus pretty frequently. As it turns out, my conception of the area’s geography was totally warped by the T (Boston public transit) – getting whisked from Point A to Point B underground didn’t do much for my understanding of where these places actually were in relation to each other.
The moral of the story is that I’m already studying abroad. I’ve lived on Long Island for my entire life, and the area around Tufts is, for the most part, still pretty foreign to me. I’m only guaranteed to be in the area for four years, which isn’t enough time for me to explore the nooks and crannies of Medford and Somerville, let alone all of Boston. I’d rather glean a deeper understanding of the area I’m in before I venture out of the country.
Now I’m in a class in which we’re studying how a group of small artisanal businesses interacts with their neighborhood, a drastically changing part of Somerville called Union Square (an experience which deserves, and will receive, its own blog post in the near future). Before taking this class, I didn’t know where Union Square was, even though it’s closer to campus than a lot of the places I visit frequently. Now I’m beginning to learn about its current social and economic complexity, its rich history, and how the past and present shape the many competing plans for its future. It’s an incredibly important part of the city, but one that I would have let slip by me unacknowledged if I hadn’t opened myself up to an opportunity to explore it.
It’s just one area of many surrounding Tufts, but it’s a start.