hi everyone! i feel truly blessed to be able to choose bw these two awesome schools. I am most interested in biology, though i do have a great appreciation for english and the fine arts. No matter what i major in, i definitely want to do pre med.
Does anyone have experience/has heard about either of the two science and pre med programs? Also any information or advice on the general social/academic climate at the schools would be welcome. I want to go somewhere where i’ll be surrounded by fun, motivated, and intellectual community
My D is a biology major at Tufts and can’t say enough good things about the program. Her advisors have encouraged her in her on-campus research, as well as nudged her to apply for fellowships, etc. Tufts is more highly regarded than G’town for its biology department, but English and fine arts are tops, too.
My D is not pre-med (interested in research), but I know it is strong at Tufts, and med school admissions are high.
Btw, your criteria—fun, motivated, and intellectual—describe Tufts to a T. Also friendly, engaged, grounded…
Here’s a recent ranking of undergrad bio programs:
Tufts’ pre med is top notch. A friend of mine who is a top researcher at Harvard Med raves about it. All my daughter’s friends who applied to med school or medical research programs got in. One worked in an MIT research lab as well as at Mass General (Harvard’s teaching hospital) during the summer. Lots of opportunities both on campus and off campus. There is also an early acceptance program to Tufts Med school. Bio is the fourth most popular major.
English is strong too. It is the fifth most popular major. Creative writing is one of Tufts’ most popular courses and one of my daughter’s friends had one of her freshman english papers accepted for publication in a popular college writing textbook.
Fine Arts is the third most popular major. Tufts has a partnership with the Museum School at the Museum of Fine Arts. They offer some courses on Tufts’ campus or you can take classes at the Museum School. My daughter took an on-campus class and loved it. She also goes into the Museum of Fine Arts a few times each semester (Tufts students are admitted for free).
Tufts has a more “artsy/intellectual” feel while Georgetown has a more “sporty/pre-professional” feel. The city of Somerville is more artsy than the area around Georgetown.
I have two children at Tufts and both absolutely love it, as do we. But we live in D.C. and the two schools are very different, as are the locations. Tufts is suburban, Georgetown is part of the city. Georgetown has a teaching hospital and a nursing school in the same general campus area. Tufts Medical Center in downtown, not on the Medford Campus. Medford is a great area and as safe as one could reasonably want and expect, but if you’re interested in health policy or public policy, Georgetown and the Capitol area are truly the epicenter of all that. Georgetown admits many faiths but is a Catholic University, Tufts is secular. The Museums in DC are stellar and all free, and frankly dwarf anything in Medford/Somerville. So two outstanding but very different choices, and you can’t go wrong; just a matter of preferences.
The art museums in easy commute from tufts are outstanding. Of course, there’s the Boston museum of fine arts and the Isabella Stewart Garner museum. But when I dropped my son off from spring break, we decided to go to the fogg at Harvard first…wow, it just reopened after several years of renovation & it’s fabulous. The collection is impressive. The Rothko exhibit is breathtaking. It’s about a 10-15 min drive from tufts.
Neither is highly ranked in Biology, but both are understood to offer strong all-around undergraduate academics.
Tufts wants to be recognized as one of the top research universities in the nation, but its grad programs (according to USNews rankings) suck.
Meanwhile, if it were still a LAC, Tufts’ undergrad quality would probably make it a top-10 or top-15 LAC.
My question is, since the grad rankings can only detract from the rep of the school, why not get rid of them and resume as a premier LAC? Because if you want to be seen as competitive with Notre Dame, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Nirthwestern, Duke, Ivies, etc., you really don’t want kids or parents to be looking up program rankings and finding all those schools consistently outranking Tufts in everything, often by a wide margin. As a LAC, that hindrance is removed.
I didn’t mean to sound so negative last night - I was in the process of cooking Bolognese and I had just added the white wine to the pot and… to myself. Hence the blustery bravado. hehe
I doubt the OP is still checking this thread, but if so, – I might still take G’town slightly on name, but OP should choose on fit and finances given that the choice is between quality peers at the undergrad level.
@prezbucky - It is probably not a good idea to be commenting on CC while cooking Bolognese sauce, the quality of the sauce and your comments might suffer
Here is a suggestion. Take this respected ranking of research universities for clinical health and click on each US University to see the data behind each university’s rank. The citation rate is a proxy for quality of research. I think you will find that Tufts ranks somewhere around number five for US Universities. The research category is a proxy for quantity of research and the teaching category is a proxy for the number of Phd’s produced. (which are both a function of the size of the graduate programs). Industry funding is a proxy for industry relationships.
If you were looking for high quality research, minimum competition from Phd candidates for professor’s time and potential links to industry to get a job, where would you advise someone to go?
Thankfully, the sauce turned out fairly well, despite the fact that I ignored it for relatively long periods of time (commenting here, annoying my wife, listening to music, etc.). hehe
I did look at the Times page you suggested - interesting stuff. If your point is that Tufts is strong at both preparing students for med school and has a strong med school itself, I accept and will remember it.
Research (and citations, PhD students, etc) has relatively little to do with preparing students for medical school or for directly training physicians so I don’t think that was his point. It seems that he was pointing out that Tufts’s graduate programs in health sciences are generally highly regarded.
To address your earlier point, a LAC and a research university are two very different things. Yes, they both generally educate undergraduates. But for a LAC that’s the primary goal and it’s very much oriented towards that. For many research universities the education of undergraduates is seen as secondary (especially by faculty) to performing research (and educating graduate students). While Tufts is not one of those places (in that there is a very strong focus on undergraduate education), by being a research university it provides a wealth of opportunities (not only for students but also for faculty) that it couldn’t provide as a liberal arts college.
Also, if you think you should eliminate departments because they’re not ranked in the highest tier just to try to boost your school’s reputation than you’re placing way too much emphasis on rankings…
