Tufts or Case Western?

Oasis9200
Mon, 17 Dec 2012 03:06:24 +0000

I am an upperclassman at Tufts majoring in a liberal arts discipline. I know most of you are going to Tufts either on a pre-med track or an IR-track. Let me be upfront about Tufts.

The Tufts Career Services resources are not great. All the internships that I and others have found and applied to successfully, have all been to our own volition (from personal connections or just applied on our own), Tufts doesn’t really care about your post-BA career and nor does its professors care about your non-academic careers. The point here is that Tufts automatically assumes that your parents own a Fortune 500 company and can hook you up with a job right after you get out. Tufts doesn’t really have a professional school other than the Medical and Dental School in Chinatown and even for these schools, they mainly pride themselves on research, not practice (as far as my Biomed friends have told me). If you want to build up work experience and go to a school with great employment connections—do not go to Tufts! Tufts is a very overpriced school with bad housing and a student body that is fictitiously and mislabeled as liberal (anti-gay free speech incidents, always getting their asses beat by the townies because they look at townies the wrong way at night—believe me, I can truly attest to the latter) because the majority of their student body consists of a silent Republican majority who come from extremely arrogantly wealthy “Old Money” families. These posh limousine liberals are not active in campus community life, but they still exist nonetheless and they are very influential on campus. I know this rich Republican (probably also a trustee) who met Clinton face to face after just “talking to the President of Tufts”. It doesn’t hurt to have a friend like him though haha, he can truly help you get a lot of financial aid money from the Student Services ;).

If you want a school that costs around the same price as Tufts, pick Northeastern University. I did not apply to Northeastern but I wish I had. I visited some friends there over the years and the dorms there are so nice and clean, and the co-opt program seriously makes NU the best non-Ivy school in the eastern seaboard. The co-opt program at NU will give you a leg up above your peers when you apply to jobs and internships after getting your BA degree.

And for those of you hoping to join the Feds doing some type of IR-related work, I have few words of kind advice for you…

1. The Fed Govt will almost exclusively favor veterans over 100% academic-types, unless, of course, your parents own a Fortune 500 company and use their money to wield political influence… So unless you plan on getting adopted by rich parents or joining the military and achieving above an officer rank above the O-4 pay grade, the Defense Dept., the State Dept., National Security Agency, CIA, or the Dept of Homeland Security won’t even bat an eyelash at you. I know this before I have applied.

2. Languages are important if you want to pursue this line of work. But, again, without veteran status, the national security apparatus just won’t trust you.

3. You might have a better time joining the CIA (if you’re not planning on joining the military) if you are a mathematics major.

4. The Fed Govt is only so big (and yes it is big), but this is a political arena here. Foreign Policy is one of the most politicized arena of the Fed Govt, not like the CDC or the National Institutes of Health. As a friend of mine on campus always says, unlike state and local governments, foreign policy is only on the federal level, hence the amount of federal FP-esque job openings don’t fluctuate much.

5. If you want to join any of the agencies I’ve mentioned in #1 without joining the military first, you should really get a PhD. And you should get one from a school with the “Old Money” name recognition like Harvard or Princeton, just to name two (not limited to only schools in the Ivy League… Stanford, NYU, and UMich will also do). A BA and an MA will not cut it anymore… federal govt. jobs are scarce when it comes to foreign policy.