The Tuftonian Dream: Motorcycle guy

When you were young, you maybe had a dream. You were going to fly to the moon, pass EC 5, cure cancer. Then, you grew up. You cut your hair, chose your major, changed your outlook. You changed a lot, but did you change your dream?

Junior Dylan Sivori was six years old when he sat on his cousin’s motorcycle. Back then, he just wanted to be “a guy who rides a motorcycle all day.” One memorable afternoon, Dylan's cousin picked him up, placed him on the cushioned seat and proceeded to take him nowhere. “We didn’t move. I just sat there, but hey! Getting on that thing doubled my height,” Dylan recalls.

Fourteen years later, although Dylan's height hasn’t quite doubled, he has infinitely increased his number of expected college degrees. The first half of college represented a painful period of uncertainty for Dylan, but he now reveals with relief that he will major in film and media studies and minor in entrepreneurial leadership studies. Dylan emphasizes that “people who knew what they were going to do going into college kind of can’t relate to how stressful it can be.” He elaborates, “It’s a snowball of stress where I don’t know my major, so I don’t know which industry I’m going to go into, so I can’t get a job, so I don’t have money to live.”

Doctors have money to live, though, which is why in second grade, Dylan started telling people he wanted to be a doctor, “not because I wanted to, but just because that’s what people said.” Progressing through high school, no class ever piqued his undying interest, and his discontentment peaked last fall when he took a psychology class. Dylan thought, “Why am I studying physiological psychology if I have no intention of being a psychologist?”

Through all the swirling frustrations of his first two years at Tufts, sitcoms like "Friends" and "The Office" sustained him. Dylan has always maintained that he’s just “here to amuse,” and two weeks after the declaration deadline, Dylan finally embraced his purpose and declared his major. Now, when he asserts that he wants to “pick [people] up when they want to be picked up or make them laugh when they have nothing to do,” he knows that he has put himself on the right track.

The old Dylan used to describe writing a successful sitcom as an “unrealistic dream,” but Dylan 2.0 says, “What’s the difference between Hollywood and starting your own business? You have a product; if it’s good, people like it, and you have a job.” After college, Dylan might apply to work at a production company in Los Angeles, or he might go to business school. Or both. In the meantime, only eleven months removed from declaring his major, Dylan stresses that “step one is to finish Tufts.” If he could relay one life message to the aspiring “motorcycle guy,” he would advise, “Stop overthinking things. Do what you love to do.”

Eventually, Dylan wants to make people laugh for a living, but for now, just like when he was six, Dylan wants to enjoy the ride.