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.

At the Experimental College, students enroll in or teach small, participation-based courses that engage with ideas shaping the contemporary world, including issues in politics, popular culture, world religions, technology, law, communications, social issues, business, healthcare, ethics, and more. Courses vary each semester and have included “Innocence and Systemic Racism in the American Criminal Legal System,” “Games, Film, and Existential Escapism,” “Who Wrote This? Chat GPT, LLMs, and the Future of Learning,” “Unfair Housing,” and “Politics of Emotion: Guilt, Anger, and Morality.” Undergraduates may enroll in combined degree programs, special degree paths, and early admission programs with Tufts graduate schools. Through the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, students can pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in interdisciplinary studio art, or a five-year combined degree BFA + BA/BS with the School of Arts and Sciences. 

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. Tufts is home to the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, a national leader in civic education and research. Through an intensive leadership program, summer internship experiences, semester-long international service-learning programs, and other initiatives, Tisch College seeks to prepare students for a lifetime of engagement in civic and democratic life. A signature program of Tisch College is the Tufts Civic Semester, a transformational first-semester program that combines academic and experiential learning with a focus on community engagement and social and environmental justice. Based in either Urubamba, Peru, or Chiang Mai, Thailand, participants join a cohort of 12 peers to create a living and learning community which engages deeply with important social issues through Tufts coursework and hands-on learning with local community organizations. 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 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.