Summer is upon us! As yet another school year comes to a close, the Editorial Board has brainstormed some changes that we hope can improve students’ experience at Tufts.
This year, students at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts became the first in the Boston area to receive unlimited CharlieCard access through the University Pass Program through the MBTA. Tufts should work to expand this program to every Tufts student. With the recent extension of the Green Line to the Medford/Tufts station, the close proximity of the Davis station on the Red Line and a number of buses that run through campus, Tufts students should be encouraged to take advantage of the T and explore the greater Boston area. To make this even more seamless, we think every Tufts student ID card should have an embedded CharlieCard chip like our neighbors at MIT and Harvard do.
Laundry should be made free for students in on-campus housing. Students pay upward of $10,128 for accommodation, yet they still have to pay out of pocket for their laundry. While this may be a measure to save on water and energy, perhaps we should be trusting and educating our students to make sustainable choices.
We want more chairs and spaces to sit. There should be a webpage dedicated to spaces you could study or hang out across campus, in addition to the existing pages for academic spaces. As we mentioned in our editorial about Tufts’ roses, we love the hidden spaces across campus but think that more of them should be available to the Tufts community and they should be easier to find.
Tufts should offer more on-campus jobs to reduce the competitiveness of the jobs currently open to students on federal work-study or to any student simply looking for a job. Tufts should also work to bring more local businesses onto campus or encourage nearby businesses to hire Tufts students.
We think the Career Center could be a better resource and more successful in meeting the needs of students by increasing the range of industries that it offers support for. Bringing in more employers from industries less represented in the Boston area could make it easier for students to access more opportunities, potentially also involving faculty and alumni that have networks with industry in the area.
The Student Organizations Fair in the fall is an incredible event that brings together so many student organizations and students looking for on-campus activities. So, we think hosting another fair at the start of the spring semester would be beneficial in getting students involved in more activities and facilitating a second cycle of general interest meetings across campus.
We would love for Tufts to adopt a longer shopping period for courses. Though our timeline for dropping courses is generous, the add period is merely a week, meaning students only get to go to class once or twice before the deadline. This makes it difficult to get a good sense of a class, see if it fits expectations and find another one if necessary. Extending the add deadline by even a few more days would enable us to better fine-tune our schedules.
Tufts should continue to work to expand the courses offered to students, increasing the disciplines represented, and to grow increasingly popular programs. The university should encourage students to take advantage of the Boston Area Consortium — including Boston University, Boston College and Brandeis University — by having departments share information about their consortia counterparts and putting the information in front of students more.
Every time a student organization, Student Life, or Dining brings an ice cream or food truck to campus, there are lines as far as the eye can see. Building on this enthusiasm, Tufts should work to bring more food trucks to campus from adjacent neighborhoods so that students can purchase food from local businesses, the same way Harvard University does for its Science Center Plaza. This could be made possible by working with the cities of Medford and Somerville, local business associations and local vendors.
Each of these changes on its own may not make or break anyone’s time at Tufts, but every step towards improving student’s quality of life improves our campus culture. The Editorial Board hopes to inspire conversation about the ways that the little things make a difference to every student’s experience.
