Alumni and Senior Awards recognize Jumbos' achievements on and off campus

As the academic year comes to an end, Tufts departments often take time to acknowledge the achievements graduating seniors have made within the Tufts community during their time on the Hill. Alongside these acknowledgements, the Alumni Awards Committee and the Office of Alumni Relations give out the annual Alumni and Senior Awards, highlighting the achievements of graduating seniors and the widespread accomplishments and impacts made by Tufts Alumni. This year, the Alumni Awards were presented on April 2 and the Senior Awards on April 9.

The Alumni Awards were started in 1941 by volunteers from the Tufts Alumni Association, according to Mini Jaikumar, who completed her graduate studies at Tufts in 1997, who is the senior associate director for the Alumni Association and Volunteer Managementin the Office of Alumni Relations. According to the Alumni Award website, the mission to acknowledge the achievements of alumni within the awards is to both inspire students and "bring honor and a source of pride to Tufts University." On the other side, the Senior Awards were established in 1955 to honor students who are preparing to become part of the alumni network, as well as to enhance Tufts' reputation in the world, Jaikumar said.

"I think alumni [realized] that they wanted to build strong and positive relationships with the students, especially if they were getting ready to graduate and become part of the alumni world," Jaikumar said.

Throughout their long history, the Alumni Awards have honored generations of graduates from a variety of fields. Past recipients, of the awards include Edith L. Bush (J 1903), the first female professor to teach in the School of Engineering, in 1941; Jester Hairston (LA '29), the grandson of slaves who became a Hollywood actor and composer, in 1990; and Jonathan Tisch (LA '76), businessman and co-chairman of the Board of Trustees, in 1997.

The Alumni Awards are divided into eight categories based upon the criteria for each award. These include the Distinguished Service and Achievement Awards and the Young Alumni Service and Achievement Awards, the latter of which is set aside for those who've graduated within the last 10 years.

While today a professional staff in the Office of Alumni Relations is in charge of the Awards, the Awards Committee, which selects the recipients from the nominees, is still composed of volunteers. The Alumni Association also has 16 other committees, including the Career Services Committee and the Homecoming Committee, which are also staffed by alumni volunteers.

Jaikumar said that the Office of Alumni Relations begins the process of selecting honorees for the Alumni Awards by compiling nominations. These nominations are chosen after reaching out to a variety of different members within the Tufts community.

“We will send out [requests for] nominations to all the different graduate and professional schools as well as to all the different people at Tufts, the faculty ... and development officers, everybody who works with alumni," she said. "And we put out a call to all 100,000 alumni."

Nominations for the Senior Awards are compiled in a similar fashion. The Office of Alumni Relations reaches out to academic departments, athletic offices, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions and the Office of Student Life, according to Jaikumar.

“We try to reach out to every department and every office at Tufts ... where people come into contact with students and again ask them to nominate talented students,” she said. “In the case of Senior Awards, there were 57 nominations this year.”

There are several stages in the process of selecting recipients for the Senior Awards, spanning several months beginning at the start of the school year, according to Jaikumar. Submissions are first processed in the Office of Alumni Relations.

“Once the nominations all come in, our office is responsible for putting everything together into one big folder,” Jaikumar said.

The nominees are then sent to the Awards Committee, which is appointed in July by the president of the Alumni Association, according to Jaikumar. The committee then sorts through the nominations by award category.

The members of this committee are all also part of the Alumni Council, which is the governing body of the Alumni association, according to Nancy Pinn (LA '88), co-director of the Alumni Council’s Awards Committee. 

Pinn stressed the difficulty of the selection process due to the high number of accomplished nominees the committee receives each year.

“For each of the awards, there are so many incredibly accomplished, impressive, humbling stories of individual achievement and community contribution,” Pinn said. “It's just so hard to choose among so many amazing individual stories.”

The process of reviewing applications is meticulous and requires sorting through a large amount of supplementary materials. According to Jaikumar, Alumni Relations compiles hundreds of pages of applications in total.

The Alumni Award applications are selected in December, and the awards committee then goes through the same process with the nominations for Senior Awards in February, according to Jaikumar.

Following the committee's selection process, recipients are notified that they've received the honor. As part of the conditions for accepting an Alumni Award, the honoree must be able to come to campus to receive their award at the annual Awards Ceremony.

“There's a bit of logistics that goes into [the ceremony] too … which is a wonderful embodiment of the work that the committee does,” Pinn said. “Even more amazing [is] to have gone through these truly impressive packets, read these stirring stories and then go to the ceremony and actually meet the people behind them. In many cases, people bring families, significant others, et cetera. It's extraordinarily touching.”

In addition to the ceremony, for the first time this year, honorees were invited to engage with students directly through classes and organizations on campus, according to Emma Daniels, an Alumni Relations assistant.

“Given these wonderful people coming to campus, it would be such a waste if we didn't try to engage them with students in some way,” Jaikumar said.

For example, Judge R. Guy Cole (A '72), Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and a 2016 alumni recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award, visited a political science class focusing on constitutional law on April 1, according to Daniels.

“They were very, very excited about it," Jaikumar said. "We wanted the students to have an opportunity to meet these wonderful people but also wanted these honorees to feel like we really valued them and wanted them to engage with the Tufts community."

The organization of these visits by the alumni reflects the goals of the Awards Committee: to further connect the alumni and students of Tufts, who will one day join the alumni community themselves.

“For the Alumni Awards, we're continuing to think about how best to connect these alumni award recipients to the campus and what's going on in the life of undergraduates or soon-to-be graduates,” Pinn said. “Similarly, for the Senior Awards, we hope to do our best to encourage Senior Award recipients, but really all graduating seniors, to take an active role in the alumni community, because Tufts is such a great network of people who really care about the world around them and about the university.”