Tufts or Stanford?

mathmom
Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:33:39 +0000

This is not an easy choice. Both my kids ended up turning down a higher ranked school for a lower ranked one because they liked the department better.

I’ve visited Stanford, but with a future comp sci major in mind so we weren’t looking for the IR side of Stanford, but my best friend from a kajillion years ago went there and ended up in the Foreign Service. My guess is that if you are interested in the Asian end of IR it might be a better choice. It also certainly has more name recognition overall.

My younger son is doing IR at Tufts now (though he’s on a junior year abroad in Jordan now). There are a lot of things about the IR department which he finds annoying, and has said in retrospect he might have been better off majoring in history and only taking the IR stuff he really liked.

So random stuff.

IR at Tufts requires 8 semesters of a foreign language or fluency. My son is fine with the requirement, but it does eat up a lot of your schedule. BTW he loves the Arabic teachers, but they are extremely demanding - it is probably harder at Tufts than it is at most other schools. (He’s been to 3 different study abroad programs so he can compare.)

IR at Tufts seems to be dominated by political theory which it turns out my kid doesn’t really like as an approach.

IR at Tufts will not give you any credits for courses taken on your junior year abroad if it’s not a Tufts program and they have no programs in the Middle East.

Thankfully he is getting some Arabic credit - he doesn’t need Gen Ed courses since they are all in the area of his major.

No IR credit for EPIIC, by far his favorite course at Tufts, apparently it’s too hands on and real world oriented for the department. But he might tell you EPIIC and the Global Leadership Institute alone is worth attending Tufts for. Here’s the link to the page: [EPIIC | Tuftsgloballeadership](EPIIC | Tufts Global Leadership) This year’s topic is Global Health and Security, it was on Nuclear Issues last year, and it will cover issues in the Arab World next year. The class reads hundreds of pages every week, has speakers who actually work in the field of whatever the current year topic is, and students organize a symposium on the topic inviting leaders and academics in the field to share ideas in the spring. They also run a program aimed at high school students.

Finally Tufts IR isn’t really the Fletcher School.

Despite all his complaints, I think he really likes Tufts, and doesn’t regret attending!