Category: Students Page 1 of 42

This is not clickbait. 

If you are looking for a top-secret formula used to determine your odds of being accepted by Duke’s Undergraduate Admissions Office, you are out of luck. However, if you’re curious about Duke’s unique characteristics, the students’ qualities, and the long-term vision of the Admissions Office, you have clicked the right link. 

I sat down with Dean of Admissions Christoph Guttentag on a mild November Wednesday to discuss these wide-ranging topics. In a world where the admissions process at top U.S. institutions like Duke is becoming increasingly competitive, it is nice to learn a little more about how admissions officers approach these life-changing decisions. Lucky for me, Guttentag warmly received my inquiries and engaged in a spiriting conversation. I am excited to share his many fascinating insights below. 

To begin, I posed a simple question: “How is Duke unique?” While many of us are familiar with the standard response given by Duke tour guides, I wanted to see if Guttentag has more to share than the touted academic and extracurricular offerings. And he did!  

“Unique is hard,” he remarked, “but Duke is distinctive.” Duke looks for students who are ambitious but celebrate each other’s success. While they are excited about their learning, they see “no conflict between enjoying oneself and fulfilling responsibilities.” This is why the school radiates with its immense school spirit, something often missing at other academically rigorous institutions.  

I found one of his remarks to be uniquely memorable: “They [Duke students] have high aspirations for themselves, and others who know them have high aspirations for them too.” Wow. What a community of changemakers that the Admissions Office is continually strengthening. Students also understand that they are “prepared but not complete,” remaining open-minded in cherishing differences and embracing challenges.

Naturally, this led me to wonder how hard it is to discern such talent among growing application pools. To put it simply, I asked: “How hard is your job? How do you approach your work every day?” 

“With anticipation and wonder.”  

How pleasantly surprising! I’m sure many intrigued readers feel the same way. Admissions officers don’t arrive at work with a grumpy face, drinking coffee until their day is over?  

“The process is never pro forma,” Guttentag continued. “Reviewing applications is always interesting,” adding that the process is a cherished opportunity and responsibility. Looking forward, the Dean expressed that his long-term vision includes expanding the economic diversity of the student body, a noble goal that allows “a broad range of viewpoints, values, and experiences” to be represented.  

What should one take away from the conversation? Embrace ambition, cooperation, a passion for learning, and a ferocious Blue Devil spirit. Never stop searching for what interests you and reject the “course of least resistance”. Think boldly and welcome challenges as much as successes, leading to endless growth that stimulates scholarship. 

Before I conclude, let me broadcast a PSA on behalf of the Undergraduate Admissions Office. According to Guttentag, a top misconception about Duke’s admissions process is that admissions officers play favorites when examining applicants’ high schools. In reality, the office has “no maximum or minimum acceptances per school.” Duke received applications from over 14,000 high schools last year—and that number is continuing to rise! 

Thank you, Dean Guttentag, for your 30-plus years of service, helping to shape Duke into the warm, friendly, invigorating place it is today. Your heartfelt conversation—and delight in Beyu Blue’s mango smoothies—are unforgettable. 

When I visited college campuses last year, there were two must-see destinations at each: the libraries and the forests (gardens would suffice at those unfortunate institutions which, by the whims of geography, lacked a sylvan space). Those two places also happen to be where I am most liable to be found when classes and tasks allow. An intriguing volume, a maze of shelves, a mossy glen, or a stand of oak or pine, and I am in my element.

Homeschooled from kindergarten onwards, I was just about never more than a few feet from a book. I believe some significant portion of the public library’s collections was usually in one corner of the living room, my parents’ books lined the walls, a burgeoning collection began to fill – then overfill – my bedroom shelf, all of which impelled me to grow up on books like bacterial colonies on agarose. I learned from books, recreated with books, and began to gain an appreciation for learning for its own sake.

Despite this apparent bibliophilia, it is love and awe for the natural world that have primarily driven my interests since at least age five, when I turned my innocent quest for encyclopedic knowledge from dinosaurs to extant animals (giving my mom a much-needed break from being Mrs. Protoceratops). I obsessively read about cassowaries or tardigrades with my best friend and began to amass the collection of exotic stuffed animals that would later form a self-governing republic and conduct mass experiments in electoral systems. Now, I explore the outdoors whenever possible, whether by foot, bicycle, kayak, or cross-country ski, yearning for the freedom of a snow-covered woodland or a bog ablaze with fall color. 

Recently, I’ve begun to see commonalities between Nico the bookworm and Nico of the forest frolic. I would like to think that I can attribute those connections to exposure to the realm of research. Since beginning work in a botany lab the summer before 11^th grade, I have seen those all-important forests with new eyes, trying my best to understand the mechanisms that drive their function, no hike too minor an occasion to be infused with the spirit of inquiry. What is the taxonomy of this striking fern? What evolutionary processes transformed lycophytes from pillars of the Carboniferous swamp-forests to humble, fuzzy Christmas-tree lookalikes crawling along the boreal forest floor? With the tools of modern science, the contents of ecosystems can be read almost like those of libraries, their eDNA forming a catalog, community ecology supplying the collection structure, and each organism’s biology holding a wealth of information.

Books, conversely, come alive under the investigative eye. Through classes focused on the methods of historical scholarship, I’ve learned how texts must be examined through their context; each author, work, or moment in time is deeply interconnected with many others. The flow of ideas through societal systems may not be too dissimilar from the flow of energy through natural ones. Most of all, libraries and forests share a sense of timelessness, that moment when the vastness of evolutionary deep-time catches you in a pensive mood, or when you begin to wonder, after spending too long browsing labyrinthine stacks or inscrutable pages, whether Borges may not have been right, after all, that the universe is composed of a library infinite in space and time, of which the center is undefined and the perimeter inaccessible.

I am Nico Zepeda, a freshman from Madison, Wisconsin. I plan to major in biology, with a whole host of other fields like history, philosophy, environmental science, and architecture that I hope to explore in parallel. I am thrilled to be in an environment like Duke, where fascinating, interdisciplinary research is around every corner, and I am even more excited to interact directly with Duke’s dynamic researchers and share their work through the Research Blog!

Every day is a surprise. As a freshman, I never imagined taking a class where I would be reading physical copies of books that have existed centuries before us. I hold in my hands a 1522 edition of “Vitruvii De architectura libri decem“ by Vitruvius Pollio. Five hundred and two years of history since the book was published, with thousands more found within its very pages. I trace my fingertips across the book, barely larger than my palm, and its aged pages that are stained with dirt, oil, and dust.

Despite being in a language incomprehensible to my modern-English mind, the book seems to whisper stories and secrets that are embedded within its pages. Parallel to the research we conduct on these literatures, we also learn how the greats have done so for centuries before us. Leonardo da Vinci once studied this same book (albeit a different literal copy of the book) and applied Vitruvius’ theories of proportion to studying the human body. His meticulous investigations led him to produce “The Vitruvian Man,” blending both art and science to investigate the natural world.

So, just like how Leonardo studied the world before and around him, we find ourselves in modern day doing the same. We study history, of the curiosity, thinking, and discoveries that make up the pinnacles of human pursuit, and we explore life, of the emotions, nature, technology, and behaviors that guide and shift our every day.

As part of the team at the Duke Research Blog, I wish to share ongoing research that is relevant and connected to you, the reader. I ask myself what information can I share to make the reader better informed about the choices, actions, people, and objects that surround their lives. From the community initiatives to the groundbreaking research to the hidden stories waiting to be uncovered, there’s always something new to learn and share. I want to shine a light on these unique stories and bring awareness to the causes and impacts that define our community.

To begin this journey, I want to first share my story. I come from Richmond, Virginia, where I lived for 16 years. My perfect day would consist of spending time at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) and my local 2nd & Charles bookstore. While I am keeping my options open for my major, I am orienting my interests toward pursuing health and bioethics policy. Specifically, I hope to improve how we understand and define “sickness”—whether of the body or the mind. I believe that the current medical system fails to treat patients for their best wellness, often promoting treatments that produce more harm than good.

Just as I aim to help patients understand their options in healthcare, I wish to help people better understand the research that impacts their lives. Through my work, I hope to share beneficial and informative insights about the up-and-coming research happening around us. I can’t wait to see what the future holds, and I look forward to what we uncover together!

When battling lack of quality sleep and what may or may not be black mold-induced sickness, I know I rely on my Writing 101 class to be the highlight of my day. (Current freshmen, take Neuroscience & Society next semester and thank me later.) Unrelated to all the intriguing questions and research we look at in there, it was also because of this class that I would find a new way to approach identity upon viewing Taiye Selasi’s TED Talk, “Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From, Ask Me Where I’m a Local.”

So with this philosophy in mind, I’ll introduce myself. 

I’m a local of my hometown, Ocala, a town in central Florida mainly known for having an extreme number of horse farms and trademarking itself as the Horse Capital of the World (sorry, Lexington). Though I didn’t grow up on any sort of farm, our family’s habit of going to the small animal auction “for fun” in my elementary school years soon led us to become the caretakers of many chickens, other miscellaneous birds, and a couple of rabbits. We no longer have these, but we do live within walking distance of many small family farms. Sometimes, I’ll greet the miniature horses while my one remaining companion, Roxie, watches them suspiciously from a distance.

The occasional summer was spent in the Xinyi District, my home base when visiting my mom’s relatives. The city of Taipei is just the opposite of Ocala, so large and fascinating that I felt like–and was–a tourist most of the time. But Xinyi is familiar to me, and my family is very local there. My grandmother’s apartment sits in an older section that existed before its development, situated around the corner from all that’s shiny and modern in the capital’s finance and shopping district. When I step outside, I can see Taipei 101 and know it’s a ten minute walk to the iconic skyscraper, or ten minutes by car to the Elephant Mountain trail if I feel like climbing stairs for a better view of the city. Our daily rituals here revolved around food and walking–I used to think I disliked cities, but I had just never met a walkable city with night markets. 

Taiwan is my favorite place on Earth, and my favorite piece of writing I ever wrote was about our breakfast runs there. In my next few years, I hope to get enough traveling and writing under my belt that those two things might change. 

In writing for the Duke Research Blog, I aim to accomplish a couple of things. A) Indulge my inner child that aspired to be a scientific journalist. B) Take a sneak peek into various fields. While I (regrettably) can’t major in five different areas at once, I’ll cheerfully settle for running around campus and interviewing pioneers of all disciplines about their work. C) Highlight research related to issues of real world relevance and importance. I originally wrote for my high school paper because I felt there was a need for environmental awareness in my area. In the same vein, the gap between what we learn from research and what occurs in the real world is largely why many of our society’s issues persist today; academia isn’t accessible to the general public. And yet, at Duke, we’re surrounded by more progress and discussion than we could ever hope to be aware of. That’s where I come into play, looking for what might get skipped over and bringing bite-sized pieces of news to you–all while becoming a local here in Durham, North Carolina. 

By Crystal Han, Class of 2028

Half a century at Duke University. And many more years to come.

For more than 40 cohorts of Duke students, Sue Wasiolek has served as their Dean of Students, affectionately known to all as Dean Sue. Today, she is back in the classroom as an adjunct professor in the program of education, teaching several classes this semester on free speech, civil discourse, and education law.

For many in the Class of 2028, Dean Sue may be an unfamiliar figure. Having gotten to chat with her several times since August, first meeting at a Project Citizen dinner during orientation week, I cannot help but share Dean Sue’s insights and advice with my fellow freshmen and students at large. So, just like many of my peers, I FLUNCHed with Dean Sue on Monday and invited her to share her perspective on undergraduate education and how students can best formulate their journey in a rapidly changing world.

To begin our interview, I asked Dean Sue to introduce herself to new students and briefly describe her relationship with the student body. Besides stating her formal role and faculty appointment, Dean Sue emphasized that her previous tenure as Dean still heavily influences her perspective as a professor. “I would have a very hard time overlooking the fact that I had been a Dean of Students here for over 40 years,” she said. “I do think about the student experience through this lens of student life and community building and wellbeing, and that is not the way most faculty think.” Just from listening to that brief introduction, I was again astounded by the deep-rooted, unchangeable connection Dean Sue has with Duke students, particularly first-year students.

Next, I invited Dean Sue to explain the motivation and creation process behind her work, “Getting the Best Out of College.” Funny enough, I did misread the title when I posed the question, labelling it as “Getting the Most Out of College.” This small slip-up led to a lengthy exploration of the book’s title and mission, and unbeknownst to me before the interview, the word choice of “best” versus “most” was precisely the object of contention between the co-authors, which also included Professor Peter Feaver and alumna Anne Crossman. “In order to sell this book, [Dr. Feaver] felt like we needed to appeal to students and their parents,” said Dean Sue. And perhaps because of the final decision of “best” and orienting the book towards a noble end, the book suffered in sales performance. “I still get royalty checks from the publisher, and I got maybe $13 last year? And that’s likely an exaggeration,” she said.

Discussing the work’s inspiration, Dean Sue said that Professor Feaver believed that the combination of student, faculty, and administrator perspectives featured in the book made it a rich, insightful read. “We cannot find another book like it… everything was admissions-based,” she explained. And despite not receiving an Oprah’s Book List nomination or other accolades for the first two editions, Dean Sue is convinced of the book’s literary value and pursuing a third edition. “The last edition came out in 2012, and the smartphone came out in 2008”, she stated, discussing the need to include pertinent content like transferring and technology in a new edition.

Perhaps the most insightful exchange I had with Dean Sue over delectable food from JB’s was when I posed the question, “What is your message to students from underserved backgrounds intent to go down a certain academic path in regard to their willingness to fully explore at Duke?” To my surprise, Dean Sue replied that her advice for such students is not any different from wealthy students. “What today may appear to bring you great financial stability may not do so 10 or 15 years from now,” she said, encouraging students to know their values and “why” that they are studying what they study. “This takes great courage, but fully explore and get off the treadmill, [which is] what you think you want to do as a career,” Dean Sue advised. Her message of taking advantage of Duke’s amazing faculty and curriculum is one I am sure all of us could take to heart.

Before I close, I must relay the centerpiece of Dean Sue’s recommendation: do not declare anything beyond your required major! “Anything beyond that limits what you can take,” she said. And this includes anything from a second major to a minor or certificate. Why not opt to explore Art History instead of taking your fifth Economics minor class when you can write “extensive coursework in economics” on your resume anyway? That is a question that many Economics students must ponder about.

I would be writing forever if I wanted to capture all the wonderful details from my conversation with Dean Sue. Her wisdom, compassion, empathy, and boundless support continues to impress all who know her, including myself. To all who have yet to interacted with her, I strongly encourage you to go out of your way to embrace her friendly smile, which you can spot around both East and West Campus.

So go and explore.

I find it easier to explain myself through my experiences with others’ writing.

If you were to peer into my soul, you would see a display of my late-night highlighted sentences and the pen’s ink bruising my favorite words. And if you were to peer into my brain, you would see what happens when a reader of fiction and non-fiction and poetry and everything in between falls in love and decides (or more accurately, realizes) that these are who will teach her. 

However, this isn’t true for all of me. For example, my name is Sarah Suzanne Pusser. Though I would like to say my parents named me after their favorite heroine in a book, I hate to inform you that my name is a medley of my family’s names before me — Sarah, being my mother’s middle name, Suzanne, being my aunt’s middle name, and Pusser, being the last name my father brought to the family that either people can’t pronounce or are too scared to try to. 

But who am I if only the attributes I never got to choose for myself? 

I grew up being told that knowledge is power. And while this is true, knowledge can also be “silly.” On my seventh birthday, I was gifted Judy Blume’s “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing,” along with the rest of the “Fudge” series. It was my treat after what felt like a lifetime of farm chores (I had to pick blueberries). Curled up in a ball on my bed, I just remember laughing, and laughing, and laughing. And in the moments of silence, I remember learning that it wasn’t just me who thought being an older sibling was hard. 

I am someone who finds both purpose and joy in learning. I am a proud older sister to the most wonderful younger brother.

In eighth grade, I wanted to challenge myself by reading a “really difficult book.” So, of course, I chose John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and boy did I hate it. I spent weeks forcing myself to “just get to the next page.” But eventually, I was done with the book, and with the feeling of pride for keeping my promise to finish the book came another feeling that something else had to be done; every piece of information I’d just read deserved to continue living. I talked to everyone I could. I asked my friends what they thought happened when they died (I know, what a mood killer), I asked my parents if they believed in religion, and through this relationship of telling and questioning, I taught those around me a single perspective (John Bunyan’s), and in return gained the perspective of dozens of others. 

I am someone who keeps a promise (no matter how indigestible the writing is). I am someone who asks questions.  I am someone who believes that curiosity and teaching should be paired together. 

I picked up Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch” because I loved the cover, and you can imagine my excitement when I figured out that the story was even better. I found myself sneaking a headlamp into my room on school nights so I could learn more about the life of Theodore Decker; simply put, this was my first instance of being emotionally attached to a book. I just needed to read it. Writing this now, I can’t really put into words why I loved this book—all I know is that this was the book that revealed my love of writing. I saw how language changed my perception of the world, and I wanted to be the creator of that for others. 

I am a writer. I am a writer. I am a writer.

Now, as a member of Duke’s class of 2028 and the Duke Research Blog, I am excited to introduce my curiosity to the infinite realms of research at Duke and let my love for writing curate the questions and answers into something you will look forward to reading.