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If you’re looking to get moving, look no further! From learning new TikTok dances in their residential halls, to hopping on Instagram lives to learn from alumni choreographers, to taking classes for credit, the Tufts dance scene is lively. You can catch their performances at one of the many annual shows, but until then, learn a move or two with Harlem Grooves.

There are over 10 dance organizations on campus, and each one specializes in something different. Whether you’re interested in traditional Chinese fusion dance, African dance, belly dance or Raas, there is a team for you. Even with so many selections, sometimes students are inspired to create a new group. Founded during the spring semester of 2020 with the mission to create a space dedicated to the history and progress of Black American traditional dance forms, our next performer to the stage is Harlem Grooves. Their forms include, but are not limited to: modern, jazz, swing, and hip hop. Themes and choreography are styled after and inspired by companies such as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, Harlem Dance Theatre, and Philadanco.

Where most groups have an audition process, Harlem Grooves takes a bit of a different approach. The group’s structure is like a collegiate dance company. They function with different branches of the company organized by dance style, experience, and comfort level. With this structure in place, it is the hope that they can foster an environment that allows each dancer to feel comfortable with both choreography and the people with whom they are dancing. To ensure that the company fosters a sense of community, there will also be company pieces. Even though the group has been around for a short time, they are already elevating the Tufts dance scene. One of the company’s current members shares, “Harlem Grooves is a company of extreme talent, melanated genius, and a celebration of the blueprint that is Black culture. Innovating and storytelling through African American styles of dance, Harlem Grooves is bringing a style of dance that Tufts has never experienced. Watch history unfold with the brilliance that is Harlem Grooves.” In February 2020, we saw the group hold a well-attended dance workshop in Jackson Gym, and during the summer, they held Instagram Live workshops with ROTI & RUM––the only Caribbean dance team on campus.

Though physical dance practices aren’t feasible with the current campus restrictions, the group is looking forward to future opportunities to perform in person and see live performances of Black dance groups in the area who work within similar and different styles. From their conception to their work, Harlem Grooves’ brilliance shows us that even a strong and diverse part of campus always has room for a new addition. Who knows, perhaps more change in the dance community is on the horizon. Maybe all we’re waiting for is you!

HERE ARE SOME MORE DANCE TEAMS TO CHECK OUT ON INSTAGRAM!

Tufts Bhangra @tuftsbhangra COCOA @cocoadancers ROTI & RUM @rotiandrumdancers Sarabande @sarabande_ensemble Tufts JumboRaas @tuftsjumboraas BlackOut Step Team @blackoutstepteam Encendido @tuftsencendido Tufts Middle Eastern Dance @tufts_middleeastern_dance Envy @envyladies

REACHING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM TO A MAJOR

The interdisciplinary studies major offers students the opportunity to erase the boundaries between majors and ultimately unlock a curriculum that is unique, personal, and full of endless possibilities.

BY CHRIS PANELLA ’21

cross its academic departments, esteemed faculty, and exciting courses, Tufts prides itself on being a college where students can take control of their educational journeys and explore their interests. It’s visible throughout the School of Arts and Sciences’ distribution requirements and the School of Engineering’s humanities, arts, and social sciences requirements, both of which prompt students to take a variety of courses outside of their intended area of study. The Experimental College does something similar: through its ever-changing, diverse sets of courses—some even taught by juniors and seniors—students can study topics that aren’t offered in traditional academic settings. And even major and minor requirements, which might seem stricter, are often fulfilled by multiple courses that students can pick from.

It’s a lot of information, but it hammers the point home: Tufts encourages academic individuality and exploration. But what does that look like in its purest form? What does it mean for students to take complete ownership over what they’re studying and how they study it? For undergraduate students, it’s all under the roof of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (CIS). As someone who truly values Tufts’ open curriculum, I was excited to take a deeper dive into learning about CIS. To gather more context, I hopped on a Zoom call with Professor Julie Dobrow, the CIS’ director.

INTERDISCIPLINARY EVOLUTION “I’ve been involved with CIS for as long as I’ve been at Tufts,” Dobrow tells me, “which is over two decades now.” At the beginning, CIS was a coalition between the various interdisciplinary programs at Tufts—like Communications and Media Studies, which Dobrow was the director of until the program became Film and Media Studies in 2015—where faculty and students could discuss what resources they needed and goals they had. At the time, only a handful of students designed their own majors, called a Plan of Study. Today, Dobrow has helped to shape CIS into much more of its own entity: Faculty share their interdisciplinary work, and CIS has developed numerous ways to support the growing number of Tufts’ interdisciplinary studies (IS) majors.

Now, as Tufts attracts more students with diverse interests, the IS major becomes much more of a spotlighted area. “Students are increasingly looking for ways of trying to join all of these things that they’re interested in,” Dobrow explains, “and creating your own major gives you an opportunity to do that.” Thanks to Dobrow’s work in expanding support for the major, interdisciplinary studies is as popular as ever—many students have it as a double major with another area of study—but its growth wasn’t exactly planned for. “It’s an interesting thing, because we don’t really advertise the program very much and yet, we have more and more students who find out about it.”

While it might seem counterproductive for the program to not be advertised as much as it could be, there seems to be a very specific reason: CIS wants students to find it because they’re interested in it, not necessarily the other way around. Dobrow tells me that the first-year and sophomore students who approach her about the IS major are very specific types of people. “I really think what characterizes all of our IS majors is that they have a lot of different interests and that they’re very self-motivated.” This makes total sense—creating your own major is quite a task to take up, and not everyone’s got the drive for it. “We’re asking people to think ahead through their junior and senior year to put together a curriculum for themselves, which is hard to do.”

UNLOCKING THE CURRICULUM The process for declaring an IS major is relatively straightforward. Students can talk to Dobrow or other CIS-affiliated faculty about their areas of interest before applying for the program. There’s a rigorous application and interview process so that the faculty overseeing the IS major can ensure that students have put together a plan that is truly interdisciplinary, cannot easily be done with the usual major/minor configuration, and is within the context of Tufts’ liberal arts tradition. Afterwards, they’re able to name their IS major and begin going through their curriculum. But how students plan their course load and their eventual senior thesis is never one-size-fits-all. To learn more about this from a student perspective, I call Isabel Fernández.

Fernández is a senior from San José, Costa Rica. Her specific IS major is Storytelling for Social Good, a “mix between gender studies, literature, film and media studies, sociology, and more,” she tells me. The major draws inspiration from the various disciplines that Fernandez was interested in during her first year at Tufts. “When I was trying to figure out what to major in and what to focus my time and energy on, there was so much that I was interested in. I wanted to major in so many different things.”

While designing her IS major, Fernández noticed that many of the areas that she was focusing on shared “a common vein,” which was her desire to tell stories for social good. “I really wanted to go in-depth on topics like gender studies and filmmaking, both in practice and in theory,” she explains, “but I also wanted to explore all of the aspects of storytelling without being limited.” Those aspects aren’t just strictly focused on visual storytelling but rather how various ideas, theories, and practices create stories that have deeper weight and meaning and can all mix to create something entirely new. “When I was proposing my major, the important thing was that it’s not just a few areas watered down into one major,” Fernández says. “It’s one truly interdisciplinary major. They’re all woven into each other. And I’m drawing clear parallels on the importance of the classes I’m taking.” As for her senior thesis—the cumulative work that all IS majors must complete—Fernández can’t discuss the project without mentioning the restrictions and problems caused by COVID-19. “I was originally going to look into feminicidios, which translates to feminicide in English,” she says, “which are gender-based

TUFTS ACADEMIC INDIVIDUALITY AND EXPLORATION. BUT WHAT DOES THAT LOOK LIKE IN ITS PUREST FORM? WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR STUDENTS TO TAKE COMPLETE OWNERSHIP OVER WHAT THEY’RE STUDYING AND HOW THEY STUDY IT?

homicides. It’s a huge issue all over Latin America, but also in Costa Rica. I was going to do visual research on how the media sensationalizes these feminicides and write and direct a fictional short film set in Costa Rica.” Of course, it’s no longer certain that this can happen. Fernández isn’t sure how she’ll approach the project and the issue of feminicide but suggests the idea of possibly doing a project with analog photography.

FORGING CREATIVE CONNECTIONS Our conversation about senior theses prompts me to think about other projects that IS majors can work on throughout their time at Tufts. With so many opportunities for research and independent studies across campus, it’s possible that IS majors can find ways to explore their areas of studies in a cumulative fashion before their senior year. For more information on this, I reach out to Casey Chiang, also a senior and a fellow Experimental College Explorations teacher.

Chiang is a double major—besides her Methods of Storytelling major through IS, she’s also studying cognitive and brain sciences. “I’ve always been in love with stories,” Chiang says, “but when I came to Tufts, I was having trouble figuring out how to manifest that passion. I took cognitive and brain sciences to satisfy my scientific passions, but I wanted something that cater[ed] to my creative side.” Between English, art, and film, Chiang was able to create her IS major as a way to study why we tell stories and how they impact us. She tells me that her interest comes from a desire to learn and a true belief in the power of stories. “There’s something valuable to just studying storytelling itself as a universal concept that can be applied to various disciplines.” I nod my head vehemently over the phone; I couldn’t agree more, and I’m starting to see connections between her and Fernández’s majors. And there are connections between their senior theses, too (well, at least through COVID-19). “I’m going to do a multimedia project that focuses around being in college during quarantine,” Chiang explains to me. It’ll certainly feel timely, and it’s obviously not something she imagined working on when she declared her IS major back during her sophomore year—which she tells me she accidentally ended up declaring past the deadline. “I reached out to Dobrow and she helped me get through the application process quickly and finish my proposal. And I had to find three advisors and interview with them all in less than [a] month. It was super stressful, but I’m so happy I did it.”

DIGITAL IMPACT ON STORYTELLING That brings us to Chiang’s Explorations course, Multimedia Storytelling. She’s teaching the course and advising the first-year students alone, which is an exciting but unexpected endeavor. “I had no intention to teach a course, but I talked to Amy Goldstein at the Experimental College,” Chiang says, “and I went through how storytelling is one of the oldest things on Earth and how it’s changed in the digital age. There’s this whole experience economy and interactive storytelling world that isn’t really focused on in classes at Tufts.” Experimental College classes are always timely and topical, so a course on, as the class description says, “the history and evolution of storytelling and the ever-growing landscape of multimedia storytelling” is an incredible offer. Chiang’s course is certainly an exciting example of just how easy it is to create new opportunities with the IS major. But ultimately, IS majors go beyond projects and classes; they lead to life beyond college and jobs. To learn more about what that looks like, I talk to Sean Lee, who graduated in the fall of 2019.

“I heard about IS through my environmental studies advisor,” Lee says, “and I talked to my advisor about a second major and all of my interests.” For his IS major, Conservation Through Multimedia Storytelling, Lee combined anthropology work, ecology, and film and media studies. The curriculum for his major came from various courses focused on everything from learning how to read scientific papers to studying filmmaking.

This culminated in Our Stories, Our Planet: Imagining a Sustainable and Equitable Planet through Inclusive Representation in Diverse Narratives, Lee’s thesis in which he “explored the diversity of characters, storytellers, and different types of narrative in environmental [storytelling].” His focus was fiction. “When people think about environmental stories, they usually think about documentaries or nonfiction,” Lee explains, “but I thought about fiction, which I [felt] there was a lack of discussion about.” WALL-E, he tells me, was one of the few movies that had a hopeful message about the environment and humans’ role in Earth’s ecosystem. He looked at other movies, too, like the apocalyptic environmental story of Mad Max; Lee was never interested in just studying one type of environmental narrative.

A VERY PERSONAL CURRICULUM Post-graduation, Lee’s quite busy. He’s currently involved in Youth Outside’s Outdoor Educators Institute and tells me how it “provides resources for people who are not always represented in the outdoors.” The institute combines those cultural and social lenses with important outdoor knowledge and resources to develop diverse outdoor educators’ skills. It’s impressive work that Lee shares his time with while advising youth advocacy groups and working on a few books, one of which is connected to his thesis work. And it all traces back to his work as an IS major. “It really gave me the agency to make my Tufts education what I wanted it to be,” he tells me.

It was only after talking to Lee that I realized he, Chiang, and Fernández all had majors focusing on storytelling. It’s certainly not a CIS requirement that students need to focus on this, but it feels quite poetic; these students are creating their own specific academic journeys and picking their own curriculums. They’re exploring their interests and developing them into real fields of study that lead to real post-graduate jobs and opportunities. They’re telling their own stories.

ADMISSIONS REMIX

WE ASK CURRENT STUDENTS TO TACKLE THE NEW TUFTS SHORT-ANSWER QUESTIONS

ALEKYA MENTA ’21 BIOPSYCHOLOGY MAJOR FROM ORANGE, CT

Throughout her childhood, Alekya Menta was incredibly shy and only spoke to her parents. Now, she is well known for her vibrant campus tours and sunny disposition. She brings this same energy to her work as a research assistant, dancer with Tufts Pulse, and resident assistant. In her remixed essays, Alekya reflects on how she has grown into her voice and has found unconditional friendship.

Which aspects of the Tufts undergraduate experience prompt your application? In short, “Why Tufts?”

I’m volunteering with Project SHARE on a Sunday, and unprompted, I receive the notes my friend took at a genetics study session I missed. I’m mid-formation change during my performance and I see my friends cheering in the back row. They have just run from Tisch Library to see me dance during their study break. I come home from my summer internship through the Laidlaw Scholars program and prepare to hear about what my housemates learned that day. We are equally as excited to share our passions and learn more about each other’s. Three examples of normal life here that you won’t find elsewhere. Tufts students want to see you succeed and will even go above and beyond to help you reach new heights. I can make friends by just smiling at anyone I see and can count on them to be there for the long run.

How have the environments or experiences of your upbringing—your family, home, neighborhood, or community—shaped the person you are today?

Growing up in my big, Indian family, there was never a time we were together without music playing. My aunts and I always dragged everyone to the “dance floor” and started dancing to make everyone feel comfortable. I wasn’t always like this, though. Surrounded by my strong and supportive family, I was taught to find power within myself and my own voice. I now hold much appreciation for my culture and want to share it with the world. I grew up training in Indian Classical dance, and one day after a performance, still dressed in my full costume and jewelry, my parents took me to Subway to grab a bite to eat. I remember being mortified that everyone was looking at me and had convinced myself that they were all laughing at me. Today, one of my favorite moments of the year is getting ready for the Tufts Association of South Asians Culture Show, dressed in my costume with my dance team, and going to Dewick to grab a bite to eat. Tufts students love to learn about what we are doing, and I have grown to love sharing a piece of me that I love so much. Relying on family support and encouragement has taught me that it’s okay to ask for help, and it’s okay to struggle to find who you are; I’m now okay with stepping out of my comfort zone and leaning on my Tufts family for unconditional love.