Currently in Tufts Life
Hi everyone! Today, I wanted to give an overview of what is currently happening in my Tufts life, specifically in my classes and clubs.
In the world of classes, I’ve been quite busy putting together a number of different assignments. While that has taken up a significant amount of time, I am very grateful for this classwork because it so often applies to real life. To give you an idea of the applicability of classes, I wanted to share a couple of the projects I’m working on.
In my PSY 32 class, which is an experimental psychology class, we are working on writing an empirical research paper—basically the kind that appears as a scientific journal article. Throughout the weeks, we’ve been learning how to write introduction, method, results, discussion, and abstract sections of empirical papers. If you choose to enter the research community at Tufts, I’m sure you will become incredibly familiar with this structure. It’s pretty cool, and certainly incredibly helpful, to be learning how to write research papers when I know my future career in psychology will heavily depend on this knowledge.
In my Parent-Child Relations class, an assignment that we just had to complete was an interview with a parent, which eventually will be used as the basis for a 15-20 page final paper. In terms of which kind of parent to interview, parents were chosen from a broad spectrum of experiences—all students choosing parents in line with their own interests. I chose to interview a parent who is from Romania, but both her children were born in the U.S. My family, too, is all from Romania, and I am the only one born here, so I was especially interested in cross-cultural influences on parenting. I’m looking forward to writing the paper because, on a personal level, my family’s culture is so important to me and who I am today. In addition to personal impact, though, the academic study of culture interests me and is exactly what I’ll get to explore through this paper.
Switching gears to clubs, I wanted to specifically talk about my theater group and how we have adapted to being in an online environment now. Since freshman year, I have been part of the Local Bard’s Players, a sub-section of the Boston Shakespeare Project that seeks to provide arts education to those in under-served school communities in the Greater Boston area. In a normal semester, we get to travel to local schools and perform abridged Shakespeare shows for young students. Now, with that kind of contact and performance being unsafe, we’ve been working on creating Zoom content that is still accessible to young students. We’ve been rewriting our scripts to include Zoom features, like characters entering and exiting from breakout rooms, and even using the chat feature to interact with the students who are watching. Though it is certainly different trying to perform theater in this new environment, I am so happy that the members of my club and I are finding ways to adapt; it all stems from keeping in mind our mission to spread arts education. Learning is difficult now more than ever for young students, and we hope that we can make a Zoom learning environment just a little more fun.
Overall, my current experiences at Tufts are certainly keeping me busy, but I feel that I’m really learning and doing what I can to prepare myself for the future and to stay connected with those around me in the process.