A couple of mornings after Last Day of Classes, I came across a YouTube clip of Mike Posner, the producer-turned-performer who will have signed a major record deal before moving into his Onslow Street frathouse for his senior year at Duke. In the video, which had recently been watched by about 20,000 people, Posner is sporting dark blue jeans, a Detroit Tigers fitted cap and a black crew-neck sweatshirt that reads "YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO DRUGS TO BE DOPE." The sweatshirt matches Posner's retro style, capped with high-top Nikes and throw-back graphic tees, and it was provided, free of charge, by a clothing company called Pompous which, the next day, was already receiving calls about the $15 top. The crowd around the LDOC-erected stage goes about seven deep before it tapers off to the quad, where revelers are casually listening while pounding cases.

The setting, in short, is quintessentially Duke.

The owner of the FlipCam pans from the crowd to the stage, where Posner's friend and co-performer, Big Sean, is rapping, the Chapel looming over his shoulder. Posner agreed to perform for free after the LDOC committee's budget bled into the red, and Sean drove down from Michigan in a rental car, and even though Posner gets on late, the crew won't let him stay past 6:30 p.m. Instead of playing a full set, he's relegated to a five-song afternoon, and when Posner finishes his penultimate offering, "Smoke and Drive," he informs the crowd of his timing predicament.

"Thank you, thank you," he yells. "They're gonna kick us the f- off stage. You guys wanna hear one more song? Put your f-ing brains in the air if you want to hear another song."

Joined at the fists, arms jump in the air, dotted with red Solo cups and highlighted by cheap Aviators and Wayfarers. Then "Cooler Than Me," Posner's most-recognizable song, starts to play, and everyone in this gaggle of tipsy Duke students begins to sing, tilting their heads and belting out the ballad. The crew cuts the microphones-Posner's time is supposed to be over-but the singing doesn't stop. It keeps going into the next verse and the next, until finally, mercilessly, someone backstage drowns out the chorus with exit music. So Posner jumps on top of a barrier to the delight of the crowd, his fellow students.

I sent the video to a friend, expecting him to be aghast at the idea of Duke cutting off one of its own. Instead, he pointed out something I had taken for granted.

"How did everyone know all the words?" he asked.

POSNER IS A REGULAR on the large collection of music blogs that any one person could not possibly monitor, so instead of sifting through them to gauge the popular appraisal of Posner, I prefer the comments under his YouTube clips, where red-hot and ice-cold both indicate praise. A selected sampling from the gallery:

"Dope."

"You killed this posner."

"Dope."

"Hot mind if i do a popping vid with this song?"

"Mike youre gonna be real big man."

"OMG! awesome."

"Grabbed it when I read about it on Twitter. Hot track."

"Dope."

Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, BlackBerry-Posner's got them all, not to mention a posse of friends all over the country ready to help him make it however they can. They're the latter half of Mike Posner and the Brain Trust, the band that put out "A Matter of Time," Posner's first mixtape, in March. I'm part of that crew, I suppose, and so is every other Duke student. Because what Posner's doing-trying to make it, that omnipotent term in music circles-isn't an individual effort, and it's not something that happens overnight.

Instead, there is a plan, and it wouldn't exist without Duke.

There must be times when Posner wants to go drink with his buddies during Rush but, instead, he commits himself to all-night sessions in the recording studio under The Loop. There must be times when he disappears for a few months, when he decides that the best way for him to become a megastar producer is to be a megastar performer. Then come the autograph sessions, the reviews of the buzzy mixtape, the links to Kanye's blog, the invitations to perform at other schools, the backstage parties at South by Southwest. Then come the contracts with the new manager, the encores on the beach, the noticing Beyonce in the hallway on the way to meet Jay-Z.

Somewhere in between come the hordes of fans. First at Duke and in Detroit-where local schoolgirls waited in an out-the-door line to see him at a local shoe store. Now, it's anywhere there's iTunes, so, everywhere.

"Oh my god, do you know Mike Posner?" my sister's high school friend in New Jersey asks me in May.

"Actually, I do," I said. "We just talked the other day."

"Oh my God. No way. Oh my God. Can we call him?"

THE BACKGROUND OF POSNER'S COMPUTER, an Apple laptop he uses to produce his beats, is his troupe's logo, a yellow lightning bolt crashing through a pink brain that, if you look ever so closely, spells out Posner. (He didn't want his name to be too overt.) The graphic represents the Brain Trust, the historical term Posner's friend from high school suggested from their days studying Franklin Roosevelt in American history. Just like FDR, Posner is firmly in control of his Cabinet, even if he's as unassuming and accessible as any other student.

"You know really beautiful women, they get famous, they're used to it to a certain extent because they've been beautiful all of their lives," he said. "I'm just a normal kid. But I'm good at music. I think I'm known for music, and that's what I want to be known for. That's, like, the only thing that makes me different."

When one of his confidantes, DJ Benzi, told him that no real artist plasters his own insignia anywhere near his computer, Posner ignored him. He's different.

Name one star, for example, who covers songs from The Fray, ELO, Gorilla Zoe and Beyonce on the same mixtape. Posner does so intentionally, all to accomplish what he considers his ultimate goal.

"The larger impact my music will hopefully have," he tells me one rainy night after finals, "is to force people who are really different into the same room. Sean does these shows at this place called The Majestic Theater, and I would always be the only white guy there. And then, the week before finals, we did a show together there and it was, like, 50/50. A bunch of people were in a room together who would never be in a room together." Which is part of the reason he admires Outkast, a mainstream hit and critical darling. "I'm trying to shoot for the stars, right? I heard Coach K made [Brian] Zoubek watch tape of Tim Duncan because they were like, 'This is the best you can be.' So my Tim Duncan is Outkast."

It would be easy for Posner to fall back on mere crutches. He could release an entire mixtape of songs like "Drug Dealer Girl" and "Smoke and Drive," two popular jams, and while that may satisfy one of Posner's two goals-get as many people as possible to listen to him-it doesn't fulfill the other. He needs a place to grow, a base to build a future, which is why he prefers songs like "Losing My Mind" and "Still Not Over You," his personal favorite.

"When I'm 22 and 23, when I fall in love and get my heart broken, I need a space to write that song, then," he said. "I want people to invest in me as a person, and not just as an artist or musician."

There are other traits that set him apart-the fact that he's white and from Michigan might earn him Eminem echoes, even though he's more like Justin Timberlake than Slim Shady and Southfield is hardly 8 Mile. But most intriguing is the fact that he's a student at Duke. He doesn't have to be here, and didn't have to return for his senior year. (When Gerald Henderson, another probable millionaire-in-the-making, mulled whether to return for his last season on the hardwood, Posner tweeted: "I might sign but I'm coming back to finish my senior year. You hear that g?")

A diploma is nice, but he wouldn't be where he is without Duke students, without the release parties at Shooter's II and packed shows at George's Garage, without the word-of-mouth grassroots campaign that bumped his mixtape up to the No. 1 free download on iTunesU. In fact, it was through Duke's iTunes connection that he released the 12-song album for free on iTunesU, a savvy business move that earned him envy at SXSW, the ultimate tech nerd bash in Austin, Texas, to which Posner drove round-trip. Releasing a track on iTunes and leaking it on an insider site like zShare means that all the people Posner sings about-including the girls in designer shades that hide their face- actually have an avenue to access him.

Duke is not a state school. Its students come from all over the country-all over the world, really-and every time one student passes on a song to a friend at another school, Posner wins.

"If I was in a different situation," he freely admits, "I couldn't go by my plan."

THERE ARE DOWNSIDES to balancing a fledgling career with schoolwork. At the end of April, he jetsetted from Duke to Dayton, Detroit and New York in just a few days. Next year, he told me, he's going to be traveling all the time. With all the hoopla, it's easy to forget that he's only released a mixtape and "anything you really think is a smash, smash hit," he told me, "you probably shouldn't put on a mixtape."

In other words, he's holding back his best. This is just the beginning, he reiterated in June, just days before he was about to sign the record deal that would put a "machine" behind him but probably change little more. ("Do I feel like people know who I am?" he said. "It's hard for me to tell. What do you think?")

That reminded me of something he said in the middle of his LDOC performance, a speech that was more of a benediction than an interlude. It served as a toast, from one Duke student to many, many more.

"Before we get into the next song," he said, "I want everyone to put their drinks in the air. I just want to thank everyone for their support this year in getting me to where I am now. That's what Duke is all about. So on the count of three, we're all going to finish our drinks."

Posner lifted his goblet-which, at this Duke event, was simply a gleaming Solo cup-before finishing his thought. "One. Two. Three," he counted. "Bottoms up."