PHOTOS: Tufts Students Join Occupy Boston Protest

About 70 students from marched into Boston Monday to join Occupy Boston protests.

Students from about 10 Boston-area colleges, including Tufts, planned to meet on Boston Common for a student solidarity protest before joining larger Occupy Boston protests in Dewey Square, near South Station.

Occupy Boston is Boston's arm of the Occupy Wall Street protests, which started in Manhattan.

Ben Chamberlian, a 20-year-old junior at Tufts, said, "I've never been to an open protest, I suppose … never anything this large."

He said of his reasons for marching, "I think it's somewhat ridiculous, just the state of the country and the economy."

"My hope is the government will see the fact people are unhappy and work on controlling Wall Street," he said.

Liam Walsh-Mellett, a 19-year-old sophomore, said of the protests, "A lot of it is just [being] fed up with the way the economy is going [and] the way the country is going."

Walsh-Mellett is particularly concerned with students "getting saddled with a lot of student debt" and the "privatization of education," he said

Perri Meldon, a 20-year-old junior, said the country is facing a number of problems and protesters have a wide array of grievances. "We're standing up for many different issues," she said.

The Tufts students gathered at about 12:30 p.m. and then marched through campus to the Davis Square MBTA station, where they planned to take the Red Line subway train into the center of Boston.

As they marched by, Hannah Simon, a middle-aged woman who attends continuing learning programs at Tufts, asked the students if they were joining the protests in Boston. When they answered, she said, "Good for you."