Tufts University
Overview
Located five miles from downtown Boston, Tufts is a medium-sized liberal arts university with a focus on student-faculty relationships, undergraduate research, and celebrating diverse experiences. Tufts' 6,700 undergraduate students pursue majors in one of three schools: the School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Engineering, or the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA at Tufts). As a tier one research university, students delve into world-class research easily and early, exploring fields from infectious diseases and water treatment to music cognition, from biomaterials that detect toxins to the impact of political discourse online. Tufts offers the chance to join a close-knit community that supports intellectual risk-taking and a global outlook.
You can’t fit Tufts students into a box. They are intellectually powerful, down-to-earth, driven, and civic-minded. At Tufts, they learn how to make a measurable difference and then start making it—even as undergraduates. On campus, the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life leads the way, allowing students to take curricular courses in social change and engage in robust service-learning opportunities. Whether they are engineers, studio artists, political scientists, or poets, students graduate from Tufts ready to enact positive change in the communities they join.
Students find community through an array of dedicated gathering spaces and programs at Tufts, including eight identity-based centers, such as the such as the Africana Center, Asian American Center, Indigenous Center, Latinx Center, LGBT Center, and Women’s Center. The FIRST Resource Center serves as a home for first-generation students, low-income students, and students with undocumented status, offering mentorship programs, first-year seminars, and an optional pre-orientation. The Center for STEM Diversity at Tufts fosters success in STEM fields for underrepresented students through a summer bridge program, first-year seminar, and research opportunities. Students can also find community and belonging through a variety of affinity groups and organizations.
Two fun facts: First, Jumbo the elephant, Tufts’ official mascot, serves as the origin of the word "jumbo" in the English language, and it is estimated that more than 20 million people visited Jumbo during his lifetime. Second, on the morning of Halloween each year, students wake up to discover Tufts has been "pumpkined"—pumpkins of every size and shape perch in strange places all over campus.
