Month: September 2018

Admissions Tips

Januarians, assemble!

Daniel Birdsall

The arrival of late September in the Admissions Office can only mean one thing: it’s time to think about January! Admissions is a deadline-driven business, and we have an important one approaching. October 15 is the date by which applicants for January 2019 enrollment need to submit application materials. This one has a tendency to sneak up on everyone. Relative to the fall enrolling class, our annual group of “Januarians” is small (usually a few dozen students), and as such the application and enrollment period for them is quite compressed. With a mid-October application deadline, we expect to release admissions decisions for these candidates in early November, and to receive enrollment decisions from them by the end of that month. There’s a lot that needs to happen in just a handful of weeks.

Read More
About Fletcher

The beautiful chaos of the Social List

Daniel Birdsall

The Fletcher student Social List has received periodic blog attention over the years, but it’s worth re-introducing for newer readers. Jessica has previously called it the “virtual glue for the community,” a description upon which I really can’t improve, although I’d elaborate that the functional ingredients of that glue are Social List as soapbox, marketplace (of ideas, goods, and services), bulletin board, classifieds, catchment for arbitrary musings, and general collective id of the Fletcher student body. A bustling e-list available to any member of the Fletcher community, the Social List can arrive as a constant ping of individual items on your device (and I do mean constant) or, for those bent on trying to impose order upon raw, teeming chaos, in daily digest form.

Read More
Mugar Cafe
General Admissions News

Coffee and conversation with Fletcher students

Daniel Birdsall

It’s hard to imagine a world without coffee, isn’t it? It fuels irrepressible banter, anchors epic clashes of will, and helps keep us from getting too verklempt. It also provides a great context to get to know Fletcher. In case you haven’t heard, our office offers a “Coffee with a Current Student” program during the academic year, which allows you to – stay with me here – have coffee with a current student.

Read More
flags in the Hall of Flags
Our Students

A bit about the new class

Daniel Birdsall

I always enjoy browsing through the profile of our entering class each fall. While many broad attributes remain the same year to year, there are always a few interesting factoids and unique details that give each class its own character. One that jumps out from this year’s report is the slightly higher enrollment of men than women in the first year class. The split is within the typical range (52%/48%, in this case), but Laurie tells me that this is the first time in at least a dozen years in which men have outnumbered women in a class, and she has a remarkable depth of Fletcher institutional knowledge, so we’ll take her at her word.

Read More
Fletcher student groups fair
About FletcherOur Students

Fletcher student organizations on display

Daniel Birdsall

With all the conversations I have with prospective students about the admissions process and academic requirements at Fletcher, I often try to remind people that grad school isn’t just about taking a bunch of classes. One of the key components of the vibrancy of our community is the variety of active student organizations, which make up what I think of as Fletcher’s civil society. These groups include student-run academic and professional journals, regional or issue-specific organizations, and affinity or activity-based groups. Whether your thing is food policy or fermentation, climbing or countering violent extremism, you’ll find something that speaks to you among the seventy currently active student organizations at Fletcher. A lot of friendships develop through the work of student organizations, and I’ve heard plenty of Fletcher students and alumni point to their involvement in them as among the most important aspects of their time here.

Read More
About Fletcher

The new old cannon

Daniel Birdsall

Tufts familiars may know about the tradition of painting the cannon. For the uninitiated, Tufts has an old-timey cannon (a replica of one from the USS Constitution) on campus, which is constantly getting repainted by various campus players ranging from official student groups to wildcatting pranksters. The cannon has announced campus events, wished people happy birthdays, commemorated important dates and anniversaries, and helped spread activist and protest messages.

Read More
Our Students

Congratulations, Rami!

Daniel Birdsall

Say hello to returning MALD student Rami. Rami is a great friend of ours, regularly volunteering for various Admissions events and outreach activities, welcoming new students to Fletcher as a featured speaker at last week’s orientation, and serving as a student representative on the Admissions Committee. We’ve been really glad to see him back at Fletcher over the past week. What a pleasant surprise it was, then, to catch him being presented with The Alfred P. Rubin Prize in International Law at today’s convocation ceremonies!

Read More
Our Students

Catching up with summer coffee hours

Daniel Birdsall

Students are back in classes, and while the weather still seems summery (we’ve been hitting 90+ degrees regularly), at Fletcher it feels very much like fall. While they were in other U.S. cities or countries throughout the world over the past few months, about 40 students helped out with coffee hours. Nearly three dozen of these events took place, ranging from Austin to Addis Ababa (and stretching alphabetically to Yaoundé).

Read More