For most Tufts students, senior spring is a ceremonious cap on their past four years. It marks a time to decrease workload, to enroll in fun classes and — perhaps most dauntingly — to figure out plans for the ‘real world.’
Senior Jack Wilan was digging through records of Tufts history in the Tufts Archival Research Center (TARC) last fall when he became fixated on the story of Jumbo the Elephant. Wilan wasn’t looking to learn about Jumbo, Tufts’ beloved mascot who was once one of the most famous circus attractions in the world. Instead, he was looking for information about class year distinctions in the 1900s, the topic of his research project for the archival research seminar “Tufts in American History”. But after coming across Jumbo story after story dating back over a century, Wilan quickly latched onto the mascot and its significance to Tufts’ history.
In 2015, Tufts English professor Rani Neutill received a message from her cousin, urging her to bring her estranged mother whose health was rapidly declining from India to the U.S. Neutill, who had not spoken to her mother for a year, suddenly found herself in her mother’s hometown of Kolkata, India after 48 hours of travel, forced to confront a complex and turbulent past while caring for her mother in the present.
Last week, “Wicked: For Good,” the sequel to last year’s box-office-shattering film based on the hit Broadway musical, made its highly-anticipated premiere in theatres. The film was officially released in theaters in the United States on Friday. Once again, the wonderfully weird world of Oz has been brought to our cultural forefront, with the film already projected to earn a record $200 million its opening weekend.
One Saturday every October, Tufts students can hop on the Green Line and, after 30 minutes, arrive at New England’s largest literary festival. The Boston Book Festival, located in the bustling Copley Square, is one of Boston’s biggest events of the year, drawing upwards of 25,000 attendees annually. The event hosts hundreds of authors, moderators and vendors to celebrate the city’s vibrant literary community. This year’s festival was held on Oct. 25 and saw more than 200 authors and moderators in over 70 sessions, including keynote speakers such as Geraldine Brooks, Patricia Cornwall, Kiran Desai, Maureen Dowd and Hafsah Faizal.
No matter where you fall on the ideological spectrum or how you feel about politics, I think we can all agree on one thing: this is certainly not “The Good Place.”
One day at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts this past summer, fifth-year combined-degree student Clara Davis took a box of 10,000 photos of legs from her locker and laid them out like a mosaic on classroom tables. This is just one example of what a typical day could look like for a Tufts Summer Scholar. The Summer Scholar program is a 10-week program that allows rising juniors and seniors to conduct independent research projects on campus under the guidance of a faculty mentor.
Comedy isn’t always easy to laugh about these days. From “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” being briefly pulled off the air by ABC after Kimmel’s controversial remarks following the assasination of right-wing political figure Charlie Kirk, to “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” being canceled by CBS days after Colbert’s criticism of a multi-billion dollar merger with SkyDance Media that required approval from the Federal Communications Commission, it has never seemed more dangerous to be a comedian on a national stage.
In the late hours of Nov. 5, 2024, former Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, called with news that put a decisive and devastating cap on her past 107 days: “I don’t think you’re going to get there.”
When senior Vanessa John toured Tufts in the spring of her last year of high school, she was met with the very beginnings of the university’s newest affinity space: the Indigenous Center. The center, which had been approved in fall 2021 and opened during spring 2022, promised to be a welcoming, open space for both Indigenous students and anyone else who wanted to learn about Indigeneity. However, back then, the center still had a long way to go.
