It is common for recent high school graduates to view their upcoming arrival on a college campus with excitement as well as trepidation. These nerves stem partly from the fact that many will arrive on campus without the anchor of a solid group of friends and acquaintances.
For the class of 2015 especially, though, social media has, in its typical omnipresent fashion, helped to alleviate this social anxiety for many high school seniors accepted to Tufts.
When the current freshman class received their online acceptance letters from Tufts last April, they included a link to the Tufts Class of 2015 Facebook group. The group exploded, accumulating over 1,500 members — consisting of both freshmen who used the group to resolve questions about their ID photos and upperclassmen using it as a recruitment tool student groups.
Although the school year is well under way, everyone has an ID and general interest meetings are all but finished, the Class of 2015 Facebook group has refused to peter out. It remains an important connection between the freshmen as they navigate their first few weeks on the Hill in an unusual show of online camaraderie.
Recent posts include polls asking about classes, funny YouTube videos thought pertinent to the class, pleas for the return of lost items and invitations to join a group of students planning to attend upcoming concerts in Boston.
Senior Assistant Director of Admissions Daniel Grayson set up and administers the group, which was created as a forum for students to get to know one another, to ask and answer questions and to get peer support from upperclassmen.
By monitoring the early activity of the Class of 2015 Facebook group, Grayson was able to find students willing to help him run it later on.
"I try to identify a handful of students every year that seem engaged and interested, and I invite them to become administrators of the group," he said.
While Grayson stays involved with the group through the summer, he stressed the crucial role of the student administrators.
"I provide guidance and support, but the group is really run by students," he said.
Fay Syed-Ali, Harish Gupta, Graham Starr and Rayn Riel serve as the freshman student administrators. Starr said that after Grayson asked them to run the group, he and the other freshmen took on the responsibility with an unprecedented enthusiasm.
"[We] decided to make it the most active group ever," he said. "So we did."
Thanks to this push for the creation of a virtual community before September rolled around, incoming freshmen were even able to meet face to face with scheduled Skype sessions, one of the administrators' more popular ideas.
"The Skype sessions were something that we planned, and would see if it would catch on," Syed-Ali said. "People ended up asking for times in different time zones, and it got bigger and bigger."
Starr said students also used the group to find classmates with common interests.
"Surprisingly, everybody is incredibly similar when it comes to certain things," she said. "Harry Potter was a common discussion on threads, as was ‘Dr. Who,' and there were some great music threads."
Students also used the group to plan a Super Smash Bros. tournament, make suggestions for the "Ultimate Tufts Party Playlist" and share the personal essays they wrote for their applications to Tufts.
The group not only allowed students to make connections before arriving on campus, but it also helped others make the commitment to come to Tufts, Grayson said.
"Students learned to identify with the culture of their class and find a common voice. This group allowed the students to bond with each other, and even convinced some to get off the waitlist of other schools," he said. "Building those connections over Facebook helped them stay with us."
The group also offered students an opportunity to hone their sleuthing skills, Grayson said. He was surprised about the detailed extent of the information that the student administrators were able to find online and share with their classmates.
"What really kind of shocked me is how much information they were able to track. They posted the orientation schedule even before it was available to the orientation leaders."
Syed-Ali says that Facebook also served another purpose — helping to ease some of the stress of Orientation Week.
"One person finds something important and posts it, and then everyone knows about it. We were able to get really prepared for college really fast," she said.
The popularity of the group has made campus celebrities of Syed-Ali and Starr, as well as a couple of their other classmates. Both administrators say that classmates frequently recognize them from Facebook. Syed-Ali is even known as "Facebook Fay" to some of her classmates.
"I think I was one of the last people to find out that that was a thing, until I came on campus and started introducing myself to people, and they would already know my name," she said. "But I honestly met a lot of my really close friends that way."
While orientation jitters may be a source of worry for students at other schools, Starr says that won't be a problem for the majority of Tufts freshmen. For him, the group realized its main goal to create a forum for future jumbos to get to know one another.
"We used social media as a tool to eliminate the awkward aspects of going to college," he said. "Basically, we united the entire class, and got people to work well together and get to know each other."
