Is Tufts "weird"?

micmatt513
Thu, 29 Dec 2016 18:32:53 +0000

The fact that the admissions office overused the word “quirky” is really annoying for a lot of us Tufts students.

There are people who really represent what the admissions committee would consider quintessential Tufts. Everyone knows one or two of these people. I have one friend who’s an Olympic weightlifter/CrossFitter/fitness enthusiast, opera singer, motivational speaker, incredibly smart, and more energetic than anyone else I’ve ever met. She’s not the norm at Tufts; she’s great and I’m really glad to be friends with her, but I’m also glad that not everyone at Tufts exudes her energy. There are people who are just your pretty typical upper middle class elite college students; Tufts has loads of these. A lot of them act like they’re unique, but they’re really not that different from most students at other similar schools. Then there are a few kids who are really just incredibly strange; I have one friend who asked me if he could take ~50 headshots of me so that he could construct a 3-D model of my head and print it using a 3-D printer (I declined, if anyone’s curious). Tufts has a good amount of people who are a little nuts in a good way. I’m not sure if there’s a higher concentration of them at Tufts than elsewhere, but I know a few pretty eccentric kids that I never would have met otherwise.

I think Tufts gives people a platform to feel relatively okay about enjoying things that aren’t particularly typical, but it’s by no means overwhelming. My roommate was a star tennis player in high school and is also an incredible metal guitarist. I have friends who spend most of their time working on problem sets and writing lab reports, but every Thursday night they get together and juggle fire. In my experience, Tufts students are friendlier than students at a lot of other schools, are incredibly smart, and generally very willing to bore you with all the minutia of whatever they’re passionate about. I don’t know if that makes us quirky, but it’s the general vibe of the campus.