Tufts Blogs

Hello, dear seniors.

I'm writing this blog from my desk at home, facing out onto a very empty, rainy street. My roommate's dog barks beyond my bedroom door frame because, in her "the-humans-are-home-all-day-every-day" euphoria, she has lost all sense of time and believes every hour she should be fed.

These days, life is not normal. Many of you are probably sitting at home like me, having transitioned to distance learning for the month or perhaps the remainder of your senior year. The presence of COVID-19 in our global and local communities has necessitated a new form of daily life, likely far different from what you had imagined for your senior year of high school. Maybe you're grieving some lost milestones: school dances, sporting events, and celebratory visits to campuses during admitted student days (we are too!). 

During this uncertain time, to make matters more complicated, you have a big decision to make. 

While these blogs are typically geared at offering approachable advice from the "experts" (us admissions officers), clear-cut advice is not my aim or my specialty when it comes to uncertainty. I want to tell you that it's okay to feel frustrated, confused, and sad about the rapid changes of the past weeks and months. It's okay to feel, with a hazy view out of your window (figuratively for you, literally for me), that it's hard to muster clarity about where you want to spend the next four years of your life. 

The view out of my own window is partially obscured by a stack of poetry books. I usually turn to these in times of uncertainty, the way some of you might turn to a trusted friend, a basketball court, the satisfying rightness of a solved equation, or a foolproof recipe. 

I turned to poetry when I was seventeen and making my own college decision, too. From my small Nebraska hometown, I imagined many possible futures. I wanted to make the pages turn faster so that I could just know where I would end up. Instead, I thumbed through the pages of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, until I found a passage that spoke to me completely. And I read it. And reread it. 

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves... Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them." 

Soon, you will be able to live the answers. You'll pull up in a packed car, or step off of a plane, on the first day of orientation. You'll set up your shared room in a residence hall, stay up late chatting with new friends, peruse the syllabus of your first-ever college class, watch movie screenings on the Quad, learn the art of long mealtimes in the dining center (grabbing seconds and thirds, studying, making space for a revolving door of classmates to sit down at your table). You will look back and see that, even in the most uncertain of times, you ended up at the college that was meant for you. 

For me, it was a quiet morning walking across the Quad at Tufts, halfway through my first semester, watching other students crisscross along the interconnected paths, a canopy of green above me, the cannon around the corner freshly painted from the night before. "This was what I dreamed," I thought. I had arrived at the place Rilke spoke of, in which the questions were no longer unsolved, and the answers were a reality I was able to live.

For now, honor the questions. And know that you don't have to ask them alone. All of us in admissions (along with excited current students!) are here to celebrate with you over email, phone, and video office hours. We're here to help however we can, as you move with bravery through this important month, and all of the beauty that follows.