It is our birthday. We can die if we want to. #emobirthdaywishes

1 year ago, the first Stuff Tufts People Like (STPL) post, Dewick v. Carmichael debates was published. During the first month, we averaged 4 views a day. Bomb ass! Now, we have hundreds of visitors a day and over the past year,  we’ve reached nearly 40,000 views. Double bomb ass! (?)

Even though STPL is on a summer hiatus, we’d like to celebrate by posting our favorite search engine terms we’ve incurred over the past 12 months. What is a search engine term, you ask? Well, the blogging platform we use, WordPress, allows us to see what kinds of words or phrases people plug into search engines (i.e. Google) that lead to STPL. Here are the funniest things people have actually Googled that have led them to the site. The number next to it shows how many times it was searched).

obsession with nudity (1)
nudity (31)
this is a robbery (1)
tufts awkwardness (1)
happy internet (3)
birthday suits only (4)
don’t watch porn computer is (3)
how many different porns in the world (3)
bisque today (3)
naked dorm (2)
bicycle orgasm (2)
average bathroom stall size (2)
tufts bubs nqr (1)
does dewick tufts have bathrooms? (1)
tufts people weird? (1)
poop stall (1)
tufts girls easy (1)
larry bacow t shit (1)
stuff tufts people look like (1)
monaco citizenship impossible (1)
is tufts an ivy league school (1)
does emma watson know about college acb (1)
real italian girls (1)
adele pisstake (1)
russian girls with laptops (1)
laptop woman or teen or girl (1)
i saw emma watson at brown (1)
why didn’t i get into an ivy? (1)
kid computer parties (1)
lego porn (2)
what’s next for larry bacow (1)
internet happy image (1)
trickturning sorority (1)
prancing round naked (1)
people in their birthday suits (1)
why poeple like nudity? (1)
dick love (1)
one upping someone (1)
what are people like in princeton (1)
naked frat toga party (2)
laptop dick (1)
tufts nude girls (1)
wat is roaming laptop (1)
jumbo toilet dispenser (1)
girl filmed pooping bathroom stall (1)
au naturel canoeing (1)
emma watson brown friends (1)
college blonds, real pictures, real people (1)

Hope this made you LOL. Thanks for reading and happy summer! Follow us on Twitter if you’re into that kind of thing.

My life is way harder. This I promise you.

Every Jumbo’s got that one friend who never wants to go out on the weekends because they have a test on Monday. You generally like this friend, but griping is just not a great way to pregame pregaming and you don’t usually see them much outside of class or Tisch.

To catch a glimpse of the Perpetually Stressed Friend, just look around campus the second week of December or the first week of May. Or better yet, look in the mirror. Around finals week, we all become this friend. Yes, the one that flakes out on friends to reread Bio 13 notes. Yes, the rando classmate that asks you for all the notes you took on Comparative Politics last year.

You may be thinking to yourself, “No! It can’t be! I’m not that douche bag!” False. We all get stressed at least twice throughout the school year. Here is one way to realize you’ve made the transition from Normal You to Finals You: competitive complaining. People like to hate on Tufts sports, but competitive complaining is an activity every Jumbo’s good at. Some people participate more than others, but its presence on campus grows exponentially during midterms and finals. It sounds a little something like this:

“This is weekend is going to be absolute hell. I have an econ problem set and two papers to write.”

–”Ugh, I know. I have three research papers and it’s gonna take hours to finish all the programming I have to do.”

“Whatever, at least your thesis isn’t due in like, three days.”

–”Oh yeah? Well four of my professors decided to schedule their finals five days in advance. Plus I have eight theses underway, I have to translate three Chinese novels into Swahili, and I’m performing in the Mongolian Culture Show for peace in the Middle East. Step off.”

This exchange is quite popular in the Tisch Conversation Area, Eaton, Dewick, and Carmichael, all places where stressed out Jumbos go to “relax” with other stressed Jumbos. Even though we may not want to admit it, competitive complaining is part of Tufts life. Let’s be real. Even if we had a stress free weekend with perfect weather and zero percent chance of finals, we’d still find something to complain about (i.e. “WTF, The Roots? I don’t pay53 grand a year to watch Jimmy Fallon’s house band“).

This post was suggested by Katie Boland (’11). Make your own suggestion by emailing stufftuftspeoplelike@gmail.com or tweeting at @tuftslikesthis

Please be impressed by my ability to walk backwards

Prefrosh, prospies… whatever you want to call them, pre-freshmen (committed future Jumbos) and prospective students (interested, haven’t committed) are great. We love ‘em. Why? They give us a reason to subtlety brag about how great we think our college lives are.

Ranked in the Princeton Review for having some of the country’s happiest students, Tufts houses some of its most vocal students as well. For Jumbos who  are obsessed with Tufts: We like showing off our pretty, pretty campus. We can’t wait to spout off a list of activities we’re involved in. And regardless of how we feel about a capella, we secretly enjoy showing off the Bubs and their mainstream accomplishments. In addition, prefrosh and prospective students give us a chance to justify our decisions to ourselves. In a way, hosting a student or giving a tour is a way to ensure ourselves we made the right choice by coming here.

Prefrosh and prospective students also give us the rare opportunity to feel authoritative. The fact that these students want to learn with us is flattering and it’s nice to be on the other side of the college admissions process. Don’t lie to yourself: it’s self-gratifying to be able to say “don’t worry” when an overzealous high school senior freaks out about his B- in AP Calculus and whether or not this will affect his chances at admission.

In fact, are you doing poorly in an IR class right now? Dragging through sophomore slump? Do yourself a solid. Stand outside Bendetson and point frenetic prefrosh to the campus center. BAM. Instant confidance booster.

Regardless of how you feel about Tufts, it’s hard not to get invested in the lives of visiting prefrosh. After the most selective year in admissions yet, current Jumbos can’t help but be curious. We want to know who our future classmates are (read: do we have any B-list celebrities). Are they smarter than us (numbers say “yes“)?  And what about them makes our admissions officers cry? Since we’re in the heat of April Open House, now’s the time to meet these creatures and find out.

I can't uncurl my fists, so I'm just typing with my nose. NBD.

Late fall and spring are beautiful times of the year. The seasons fold into one another and students notice a change in temperature, wardrobe, and most importantly, SIS traffic.

Regardless of what your orientation leader tells you about TuftsLife.com, SIS is the website from which all Tufts students plan their frenetic lives. SIS is where we track our transcripts, deliberate over whether or not we’ll make the Dean’s list, and grumble over our plummeting GPAs. Most importantly, SIS is where we all register for classes during the late fall and spring.

Although you will be notified of registration period via email, it’s easy to pick up on the change in campus atmosphere this time of year. Jumbos are glued to their laptops during class, monitoring the rise and fall of class sizes. In between periods, Jumbos carry those thick course booklets with a heightened sense of awareness, circling blocks of seminars in red marker as if to say, “I’M PREPARED. HOW ABOUT YOU.”

Even though no one actually cares, everyone will start conversations with “What are you taking next semester?” This conversation starter is a BAD IDEA. Mainly because it invites the other person to list every single problem they have with their scheduling. Here are a few examples:

“Oh my god, I have such a shitty registration time. Which is totally unfair because I had one last year, too”

“Math of Social Choice already has a waitlist! I’m so not gonna graduate.”

and most importantly…

“EXPLETIVE EXPLETIVE EXPLETIVE FUCKING EXPLETIVE SIS just FUCKING SHUT DOWN ON ME.”

Hating on SIS is just part of the registration process. The sooner you come to terms with the fact that a) SIS is a temperamental shrew and will only operate on select few Internet browsers b) SIS likes to take its sweet time logging you in while spots in highly coveted classes fill up  and c) SIS sucks, you will be a happier Jumbo. In the meantime, go ahead and accept being on the waitlist for 4 classes; it’ll all work out in the end.

"What's a five letter word for phallus?"

Since NQR has been banned, there have been laments about the fact that Tufts people don’t participate in  enough campus-wide activities. This is false. The Tufts Daily creates a campus-wide activity every day through their comics page.

If you say you’ve gone through your entire Tufts career without attempting to blaze through Sudoku in the middle of a lecture, you are a liar. And if in fact you are telling the truth, you cannot deny that you have, at one point, spent half an hour struggling with a seven-letter word for “Sturgeon yielding expensive caviar” during a solo lunch in Carmichael.

By making us look like we’re busy and don’t need friends, the Daily’s Word Jumble is also a wonderful resource for avoiding communication with classmates.  It’s just mind tickling enough to distract from the awkward silence of an empty classroom, but not so challenging that you end up in tears.

And if you really feel the need to break the ice, you can always chortle at “Married to the Sea.” Hopefully this will invite someone to ask you why the hell you’re snorting into the newspaper (this is a classic pickup line that has been used many a time at Tufts and it is the reason for many of the relationships you see around campus).

Bolles House

Freshmen, complain all you want about the monstrous hill you have to climb every day to class but just admit it: our campus is tiny. Everything is basically within a fifteen minute walk. Though this keeps our pre-arthritic knees happy and healthy, there are some trade-offs. Our small campus means that our department buildings are closer to each other; but this also means that some of our meetings with our academics occur in neighborhood houses converted into university space.

It’s a little odd that some of Tufts’ department buildings blend a little too easily into the Medford/Somerville neighborhood. But aren’t these houses actually kind of cozy? There’s something oddly comforting about arriving at the Alumni House to inquire about Ex College classes and realizing you have to walk up a driveway and sidle past what looks like your grandmother’s front doorway. The same goes for meeting a mentor at the Fine Arts house or any other university-related building like the Counseling & Mental Health center or the LGBT house. These academic buildings might have odd remnants of domesticity within (bathtubs in the bathrooms, etc), but homesick Jumbos craving the quaintness of American suburbia can get their dose just walking around Mr. Larry’s Neighborhood. Home sweet home.

Listen to me.

“Symposium” is a fancy word for “conference.” And “conference” is just a fancy term to describe a series of lectures. In ancient Greece, a symposium was a drinking party. Whatever happened to the good old days?

Even though academia has taken the good ol’ symposium and crafted it into a stiff event where we “learn things,” it doesn’t mean we can’t still like it. In fact, we love them! Tufts people thrive off symposiums. Where else can we prove our knowledge of the impending water shortage or relations between U.S. and China? Olin? (There’s a language barrier on every floor, so… no.)

In addition to providing students an additional outlet for all their worldly knowledge, symposiums mainly offer students the opportunity to plan things. Think about; how many people do you know actually attend an event like “Our Nuclear Age: Peril and Promise” of their own accord? Kind of a downer weekend activity. Let’s be honest, that kind of event looks much better on your resume than your Blackberry calendar. That very reason is why, at any given time, a Tufts person knows at least one other Tufts person breaking their back to plan one of these events. Not to disregard the efforts of EPIIC or ALLIES, but what if we included the festivities of a traditional, ancient Grecian symposium? Food for thought.

OH YEAHHHH

Remember when Chipotle got popular when we were all in high school? For all you Jumbos hailing from American suburbs, you know lunch and weekend outings were all about driving your mom’s 1998 Toyota Camry to the nearest location, ordering a burrito the size of a newborn baby, and stuffing as much extra rice and guacamole in it as possible. Back when Facebook groups were still popular, hundreds spawned from our obsession with Chipotle. We loved its simple menu and the way its flavorful carnitas sat heavily in our stomachs while we scarfed everything else down in under 12 minutes.

But when we came to Tufts, our tastes grew up with us. Food became less about quality and more about stretching the last bit of JumboCash remaining on our IDs. We made do. Trick turning from Hodgdon was great… until we got tired of eating shitty Chinese food and gummy bears for dinner. The solution to this problem? Anna’s Taqueria. Located in the southeast corner of Davis Square, Anna’s has cured countless Saturday morning hangovers and fueled hungry shoppers headed to the Goodwill for themed party attire.

As far as the menu goes, variety is not its strength (it offers tacos, quesadillas, and a “Mexican platter”). But as with Chipotle, we like the simple offerings and lack of pretension. The platter item is rather elusive, but if it’s on the menu, it’s probably an orgasm in your mouth.

Of course, the most popular item on the menu is the burrito. Even with its price increases, Anna’s is clearly the best Mexican food deal in the Boston area. A regular 10″ burrito will cost you less than $5 and for a couple cents more, you can upgrade to a super burrito with 2 inches of added goodness. BAM.

Did we mention they have Jarritos? Shit just got real.

W0mp w0mp w0mp w0mp

For a school that idolizes its a capella groups over any of its sports teams, music taste is something both highly coveted as well as severely judged. The same guy who might share your penchant for Kid Cudi might become a mortal enemy when he starts hating on Erykah Badu. Thus, the dichotomy of music taste on this campus has led to separate factions of audiophiles. You’ve got the Top 40 fans who frequent frats, the folksy followers of indie rock who live in the WMFO station, the NEC-dual degree lovers of Bach, and many, many more.

The one unifier between all these groups? Dupstep, the clean, mean, genre of the new decade. Sure, it’s been around for a while, but dupstep has only recently made it into the mainstream. Consider tonight’s dupstep party in the Crane Room hosted by Midnight at Tufts and a similar party hosted by ATO earlier this semester. It appears that the phat, phat beats of Nero and Sub Focus are enough to bring even the most straight-laced Jill and the preppiest Bub out from their hiding places and into the spotlight. Thick bass, dusty reverb… it’s an audial orgasm for the masses and Tufts people can’t get enough.