This past Friday, I attended an informal talk led by the Dean of Admissions. The ten of us sat with our chairs in a circle as Dean Coffin spoke about the ways in which Admissions has changed since he assumed office 13 years ago.
The night prior to this talk, I was walking down Packard Avenue with a good friend I met at Tufts when he spontaneously exclaimed that he absolutely loved our school. I asked him why.
“Don’t you feel like there are so many people here who are decent, approachable, kind people? Even if you aren’t friends with someone--even if your personalities don’t quite click--a lot of the people here are just genuinely...good,” my friend remarked.
I agreed, but I told him that what he had described was likely a coincidence. It takes Admissions Officers long enough to consider the academic achievements, personal qualities, and individual experiences of each member of the applicant pool, I said. There’s simply no way that Admissions Officers have the time to concern themselves with whether or not Tufts students will actually get along. That part happens (or doesn’t) naturally.
No more than twelve hours later, I was proven wrong.
At one point during our conversation with Coffin, he said, almost as if in direct response to my remarks the night before, that, “We know that the people we select are people who you’ll be rooming with and who you’ll be sitting in class with. If our student body lacks academic and social cohesion, it falls apart.”
Many of the other “Why Tufts?” blog post authors emphasize the quality of the people who constitute the student body. I agree with them wholeheartedly. Yet, you blog readers probably know as well as anybody that each person’s experiences with social life in college are inevitably different. The words above, however, came directly from the mouth of the Dean of Admissions himself. You heard it here: the Admissions Office at Tufts takes social compatibility seriously.
So while I can’t guarantee that you’ll meet your best friend or your soulmate here (though I wish I could), I can promise you that you will be surrounded by many friendly, intelligent, and yes--“quirky”--people. I mean it.
(If you want to read more about Dean Coffin’s legacy, click here: https://tuftsdaily.atavist.com/lee-coffins-legacy)