If you ask me why Tufts attracted me at the beginning, I will say the Leadership Studies minor in Tufts School of Arts and Sciences. Different from other Leadership minors I’ve seen elsewhere, Tufts offers a great range of classes, even including Anthropology and American Studies classes (Ok, advertisement will pause for a while).
I always want to be a good leader and I have been trying to be one in the past 5 years. In China, every high school class has a monitor. I’m one of them.
“Tony, write today’s homework on the white board!”
“Bill, post this week’s course schedule on our door!”
Those are not what a monitor would do. In our high school, each class is a team. We participate in sports events together, we perform together and we live together in our dorm. So, the monitor is the team leader. As I mentioned earlier, I have been the team leader for 5 years. Even though I consider myself still far away from a good leader, I grew my own understanding of leadership. Hence, I will share my thoughts on leadership and how it is related to multi-disciplinary studies.
Recently, I finished reading the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” In one short chapter, the author mentioned that leaders and decision makers do no better than luck. He called leaders “gamblers”. Because luck controls the outcome of this complicated world. I, however, hold a strong objection to his claim. Leaders are indispensable in any form of organization. From ancient clans to Forbes top 500 companies, each of them have a leader. It’s true that statistically speaking, leaders might not have control over the outcome, but leaders unite people. As a monitor, I know that deeply. Once our class participated in a school choir competition. Every night we practiced until the moon was high up in the sky. What I did was to buy everyone in my class green tea to comfort their throat. When they got the tea, I could see their smile and feel their power to practice harder. Don’t ask me about our ranking. It doesn’t matter to a united team because we became better during the process.
Actually, uniting and inspiring people is only one primary duty of leaders. Moreover, leaders have to arm themselves with various kinds of knowledge. Leaders need to know history in order to understand different cultural backgrounds in their team; Leaders need to know psychology to manage the emotion of their team; Leaders need to know statistics to make the best decision for their team; Leaders need to know……The list goes on and on. For me in a high school, things can be more diverse. One day we need to do a semester summary; the next we go to the basketball court. So knowing a bit from every field keeps me in pace with “experts” and cooperate with them more efficiently.
That makes being a leader an extremely complex job. But like it or not, more and more kinds of jobs in society today need multi-disciplinary knowledge. Tufts must have realized that and offers students many interdisciplinary minors just like leadership studies (advertisement begins again). Actually my top criteria when choosing schools was that they don’t have a core. So that students are welcome to do a double major or do a minor to enlarge their knowledge. Many schools meet this criteria, but Tufts' way of designing majors and minors with classes from different departments makes me stick with the Jumbo.
Here is my story and a little “Why Tufts.” As a rising 2020er, I can’t wait to immerse myself in Tufts classrooms.