News
October 5
When you look at recent college rankings, you'll find that our university, Tufts, is rather highly ranked. If you look at the World University Rankings for 2010, you'll see that Tufts University is ranked two places higher than the nearby Ivy League, Brown. If a random passerby in Boston or Medford happens to ask you where you go to school, and you say "Tufts," the response you're more or less likely to get is "Wow, that's a great school," or something along those lines. And actually, from what I've heard from a lot of my classmates who have been to high school in the States, this reaction is not unusual. Tufts in the United States has a similar academic reputation to what one might find at an Ivy or a Stanford. Yet 7,000 miles away in India, or perhaps even farther away in places like Singapore or Thailand, the reaction you'd get would be totally different. Of course, I can only speak from my own experience and the few other quips and comments I've heard from the people I've spoken to on the subject. In those places, Tufts is almost unheard of among the common people. In New Delhi, when you tell a person that you're going to the United States for college, if you aren't going to a "Harvard" or a "Princeton," you're not really going anywhere necessarily worth hearing about. Name recognition matters to many and for lots of people in these countries, Tufts doesn't have the name that it deserves. To date, I have relatives who aren't sure if I'm going to a school named "Tufts University" or "Tuft" as in a "tuft of grass." It is true that if one happens to go to an international school or visit an external counsellor for college applications, Tufts has a higher chance of being featured in the conversation. But even then, for a lot of students, it is treated as a back up to Ivy League schools. The attitude people display is, "Oh, I didn't get into Yale. Therefore, I'm going to Tufts." While I'm not exactly prepared or equipped to argue that Tufts is academically superior to Yale, I cannot deny the fact that Tufts is a superb institution, and it being a "back up" is almost preposterous. In terms of my personal experience, back in April and early May, I was struggling to choose between Tufts and New York University as to where I'd like to attend college. If you actually look at it holistically, Tufts is superior in almost every way: academically, in terms of the quality of residential life, etc. NYU only prevails when it comes to the fact that, as the college is in the city, it encourages students to explore more and to be more independent. Coming from a smaller high school, though, I was used to the idea of campus life. If I think about it retrospectively, I'm not entirely sure why it was so difficult for me to make the choice. However, it pains me to admit it, but I suppose part of the dilemma came from the fact that almost anyone I asked (aside from my friends in high school) had pretty much never heard of Tufts. NYU, on the other hand, was a big enough name in India. People knew of NYU. And therefore, even understandably, people urged me to choose the name they knew and not the one that sounded like the "tusk" of an elephant. At the end of the day, I'm glad I'm here at Tufts. I'm glad that I didn't choose the school on the basis of its name and reputation back home in India. Yet, at the same time, I'm glad that in the United States (or at least in Boston) Tufts truly does obtain the respect that it should.
