The patient’s vital signs were dropping. A Tufts University first-year student leaned over the hospital bed, scanning a monitor and calling out numbers while classmates debated the next step. Should they administer oxygen? Start an IV?
Around the bed, the students watched closely as the patient reacted to each intervention they tried. The “patient” was actually a mannequin used for medical simulations. But the experience felt remarkably real—which was exactly the point.
This scenario unfolded last week as one track within JUMP-IN (short for Jumbo Undergraduate Mission for Personal Insight and Navigation), a new Tufts program that gives students a chance to spend spring break exploring possible professional paths through immersive weeklong experiences led by faculty from a range of fields.
“All of us begin with hypotheses about where we might want to take our lives and our careers,” says Cigdem Talgar, vice provost for education and one of the program’s designers. “But we rarely have opportunities to test our assumptions. JUMP-IN gives students exactly that chance: to experiment, explore, and build community with peers who share similar passions while doing so.”
In its inaugural offering, JUMP-IN gave students five different tracks from which to choose, each connected to a different school at the university; tracks were offered in medicine, design problem-solving, global policy, dentistry, and nutrition science. While most participants are first-year students at Tufts, the medicine track included some sophomores as well.
“Immersion is an excellent way for students to begin to assess whether the field they’ve chosen is something they want to continue pursuing,” says Ellise LaMotte, associate provost for student success and JUMP-IN’s lead organizer. “We designed the experience to give students an authentic glimpse into what it means to work in these areas.”
On the Right Track
To help them catch those authentic glimpses and feel empowered about their decisions regarding the future, the program exposed students to real-life professional work settings, introduced new skills to them, connected them with peers and mentors, and guided them through careful reflection.
For example, in the Tufts University School of Medicine track, students were exposed to skills including taking vital signs, inserting IV lines into simulation models, and responding to emergency medical situations. The exercises allowed them to experience the fast-paced decision-making of clinical medicine.
“For students who are thinking about a pre-medical track but who have never been in a clinical setting, this is a good starting point,” says Diren Pamuk, associate teaching professor of chemistry, who helped develop the program. “It’s probably the closest they can get to a real-life situation where they have to think on their feet and use what they have learned,” Pamuk says.
At the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, students explored how food systems connect science, economics, and global trade. One exercise—the Nutrition Myth Lab—tasked teams of students with investigating and presenting findings on a popular nutrition claim; one group relied on academic literature while the other used only social media sources in their research. Another activity simulated the negotiations and tradeoffs involved in shaping food policy.
Students in the global policy track examined international challenges, met with Fletcher School researchers, and explored how decisions are made at the intersection of economics, law, and global affairs. At the Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, participants learned how dentists diagnose and treat common oral health conditions.
On another track, with guidance from the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach, students worked on a Smart Playground project, integrating sensors and controls into existing playgrounds to experiment with supporting computation thinking by children during their play.
Across all five tracks, the emphasis was on learning through experience rather than content acquisition alone—and then, in the evenings, stepping back to consider what the day’s activities revealed. To support that process, the full JUMP-IN cohort came together every night for advising and peer conversations, career exploration sessions, and guided reflection.
“For the program to be effective, students have to process the opportunities they had, explore how they felt in the moment, and consider where their curiosity might lead them next,” explains Kirsten Behling, associate director of the Student Accessibility and Academic Resources (StAAR) Center, who helped design those evening sessions.
“Reflections are key to helping students take a deeper look at the experiences as they apply to their lives,” she says. Also crucial, she notes, is the program’s community-building aspect. “When students come together in the evenings, they can discuss with each other what they’ve learned. Sometimes, it’s difficult to take a step forward as an individual; our hope is that students lean on their peers as they explore their interests.”
Experiential Learning as a Foundation
JUMP-IN grew, in part, from Pre-Med Connect, a 2025 spring break initiative that introduced students early in their undergraduate career to clinical environments at the Tufts University School of Medicine.
Pamuk, who worked with the Center for Science Education at the School of Medicine to create that program, says that experience helped organizers see how immersive programs could connect undergraduate students with the expertise and resources available across Tufts’ different schools.
“We realized that many parts of the university were already doing this kind of experiential learning,” says Pamuk. “The question became how we could bring those opportunities together and make them accessible to undergraduates earlier in their time at Tufts.”
The strong response to the Pre-Med Connect pilot—from both organizers and students—helped inspire the broader JUMP-IN initiative.
For Talgar, that expansion to this year’s JUMP-IN program reflects a larger vision for how experiential learning can shape the student experience.
“Learning from experiences and connecting their learning from one experience to the next shouldn’t be just one component of a student’s time at Tufts,” she says. “It should shape the way they think about designing their lives, their impact, and the kinds of careers that will allow them to make that impact.”
LaMotte describes the program’s ultimate goal in similar terms. “Success, for me, means that JUMP-IN helps students understand how to be intentional about their academic success, their life design, and their career exploration,” she says.
Just as important, LaMotte adds, is the sense of belonging that can grow from shared experiences like JUMP-IN. “We want students to recognize that they’re surrounded by peers, faculty, and staff who are ready to support them throughout their academic and career journeys,” she says.
Organizers are eager to learn from the inaugural cohort. Student feedback and surveys will help guide how the initiative evolves and how Tufts might develop similar opportunities in the future.
For LaMotte, the ultimate goal goes beyond any single week of programming.
“I hope students discover that they’re on a journey,” she says. “They don’t have to determine their exact career path right away. What matters is that they feel capable of learning whatever they need in order to succeed in the life and career they ultimately choose.”
