I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: graduate school is about much more than taking a handful of classes over a couple years. Fletcher students are of course deep thinkers, but they’re also active doers. It’s been gratifying, then, to see an uptick over the past few years in programming and available funding to help support the various professional and scholarly pursuits of our students.
Read MoreWhile it may seem paradoxical at first glance, it’s quite common to find Fletcher students with deep interests in local and domestic public policy. Perhaps it’s all those “Think Globally, Act Locally” bumper stickers yielding dividends. I tend to think it’s more the result of the interdisciplinary mindset of our students, with which they can see the international dimensions of local policy, and vice versa (contextual intelligence, as Fletcher’s Institute for Business in the Global Context would characterize it).
Read MoreThe 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 MoreThe 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 MoreIt’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 MoreWay back in 2011, Jessica wrote about Fletcher’s then-brand new Map Your Future application pathway. Being an optimistic bunch, we were excited to bring online a unique program to help younger candidates get to Fletcher (in brief, “MYF” is a mechanism for a two-to-three year deferred admission for college seniors and recent grads).
Read MoreI 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 MoreWith 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 MoreTo paraphrase recent Fletcher grad and former student blogger Mariya, the Fletcher community is everywhere. Every so often, some members of our community turn out to have a pre-Fletcher history, and this year brings us a particularly unique instance of a longstanding friendship continuing into the academic year.
Read MoreTufts 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.
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