Engineering Your Application
December for most seniors means finishing up college applications. This blog is for all the future engineers applying to college! As you put your final touches on your application, tweak your supplements, spell check your activities list, I encourage you to consider this question: "Does my application reflect one of a potential engineer?"
This may seem daunting especially if you haven't had as much exposure to engineering. Don't worry. At Tufts, we enroll a diverse array of engineers, some who have been on a STEM track their whole lives, some who have always embraced their inner Bob The Builder and others who may have always excelled in math and science classes but only recently stumbled upon engineering as a potential career path. The important thing is that regardless of your exposure, in your application, there is some evidence of not only your budding engineering interest but also your fit for our Tufts engineering community.
How do you do that you ask? Here are four different areas of the application where we can find hints of Tufts engineering fit.
- Academics
At the very minimum, at Tufts, we require students applying to our School of Engineering to have exposure to calculus and physics in high school. In order to be adequately prepared for our level of rigor, this is a must. We are looking to set you up for success and these high school classes play a big role in that. - Extracurricular activities
For those of you who have participated in robotics, engineering related internships or summer programs, this is the place to tell us! Engineering related activities can take many different forms. If your eagle scout project included some hands on, building or construction work, let us know! If you have been in theatre tech all throughout high school, from lighting to set design, that’s engineering! We want to know about your hands on experiences, how you have problem solved and worked collaboratively in teams. In the description, don't forget to give us more detail about what kind of work you did and what role you played in each project.
For general advice on what to include in your extracurricular list and what not to include, please see Virginia's blog! - Essays
We understand that not every student has had access to engineering opportunities. Don't fret. With any applicant, essays are the best way for us to hear your voice, learn about your personality and intellectual interests. Tell us what part about engineering sparks your intellectual curiosity or how you stumbled upon engineering in the first place! If you're answering our supplement tell us about the music engineering class you would teach or the clean water access problem you aspire to fix. Beyond this, we're also reading in between the lines to find those hard to quantify soft skills that might suggest you have the grit, collaboration, kindness, creatively, resilience to be a Tuftsy engineer.
For more on engineering your supplement, see Beky's blog! - Maker Portfolio (OPTIONAL - not secretly required)
Finally, for those have had some more tangible engineering opportunities, the maker portfolio gives you an opportunity to showcase in more detail any engineering project you have created, invented, coded or designed. It'll show us both the hard technical engineering skills but also your ability to problem solve, bounce back from failure and collaborate.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog on how to put your best foot forward when completing your maker portfolio, check it out!
Here you have it! My PSA on how to engineer your application. Your application does not need to scream engineer in every single aspect. Trust yourself to highlight your inner Tuftsy engineer and trust us to find those qualities that we think would make a great fit for our community. Good luck!