Tufts Bands: The Rare Occasions
At the end of my freshman year at Tufts, my track coach sat me down and told me I was going to burn out.
I was an electrical engineering student, a three-season varsity athlete, and a touring musician. Coach was looking out for me; he’d seen other athletes play the balancing act, and it wasn’t easy for them.
Coach also had another saying: “Nothing in life worth anything comes easy.”
I suppose at the intersection of these juxtaposing pieces of advice I found some sort of twisted motivation. I’m now a senior. Still an electrical engineer. Still an athlete. Still making music. In fact, here at Tufts, I am thriving. In my time on campus, I’ve built robots, learned how to record music, and interned as a hardware engineer at a local music tech company. I’ve competed in two cross country national championships, made All-Region teams for indoor track and cross country, and was part of two NESCAC-winning teams. With the help of my bandmates I’ve won songwriting contests, shared the Prez-Lawn stage with Guster and Lupe Fiasco at Tufts’ Spring Fling, and gigged at venues and colleges across Boston and beyond. I even spent my most recent spring break performing at the SXSW music festival in Austin, TX.
None of this success has come without struggle, and this is what I find so beautiful about Tufts.
I often hear this phrase passed around campus: “College is what you make of it.”
Every day I am surrounded by people who are driven by that same deep-rooted passion. It could be a friend from poetry class who devotedly advocates for racial equality, an engineering classmate who explains complex signal processing algorithms over lunch in Dewick, or a music professor who composed a piece using the digits of pi to help me personally understand the beauty in musical randomness and atonality. Whenever I find myself in a moment of self-doubt, I simply look to the people around me, and I see my teammates, classmates, and professors fighting the same fight. This is what drives me, and I truly believe that this is what collectively elevates this campus to being the extraordinary place it is.
Here's a link to our music: http://therareoccasions.bandcamp.com/album/applefork