It sounded like the perfect story: Figure out who is ranked first academically in the senior class and find out how they got there. Not only did I assume it would be easy--after all, who wouldn't want to admit being at the top of their class?--but I thought it might be potentially juicy as well. I had images of grade-grubbing pre-meds double-crossing each other to get to the top, soon-to-be-law-school-students seducing professors to see if they could get that A- bumped up to an A, and career-crazed almost-investment bankers paying to keep their 4.0s.
It turned out there was just one problem--most of the students everyone thought were Number One are not, and whoever is Number One has eluded me. What's more, all of the "contenders" I spoke with--students whose peers suggested they may be at or near the top--were in agreement: Grade point average means nothing, and the difference between a 3.8 and a 4.0 is utterly inconsequential. "Yuck," I thought. "They're too rational. How boring."
In truth, though, while these interviews with some of Duke's top undergraduate minds may not make for Tom Wolfe-style reading material, they are definitely a good sign for the University, which has for years suffered complaints from students and faculty that compared with its peer institutions, Duke is too career-driven and not intellectual enough. From James B. Duke Professor of English Reynolds Price's Founder's Day speech in 1992 (in which he said a "prevailing cloud of indifference, of frequent hostility, to a thoughtful life" was holding Duke back) to more recent critiques, criticism of Duke's "anti-intellectualism" continues. While the problem clearly exists, though, what these interviewees revealed was that among many of Duke's most promising students, taking intellectual risks is what matters most. Their response to "Who is Number One?": "Who cares?"
The Chronicle recently ran a story on senior Melanie Wood, an Angier B. Duke Scholar who placed among the top five in the 63rd William Lowell Putnam Competition, one of the most prestigous math competitions for undergraduates. The math major and philosophy minor was recently named a fellow of the Mathematical Association of America; she is the first American woman in the world (and only the second woman) to be able to claim the title. Next year, Wood will study on a one-year scholarship in Cambridge, England. Many of her peers suspected Wood was at the top of her class, but "no," she says, "not at all."
For Wood, learning at Duke has never been about getting the A. While her math record is nearly perfect, she says she has taken classes out of her area of specialty, both because of intellectual curiosity and for fun. "I've taken classes in which given my abilities and skills I knew I couldn't get an A," Wood says. An actress and theatergoer since high school--this year Wood assistant-directed a Duke production of Macbeth and produced The Mystery of Edwin Drood--she says many of her most difficult classes have been in the Department of Theater Studies. "I've done well in many of them, but they've really pushed me a lot," she says.
While Wood says GPA has never been a concern for her personally, she can understand why it matters to some students. "The people I know concerned about GPAs are hoping to move them from a 3.3 to a 3.6," she says. "And there is a difference. When you're applying to schools--[especially] law school--it matters. But I don't know anyone trying to move from a 3.9 to a 4.0. The difference between those numbers doesn't [matter]."
Like Wood, senior Jacob Foster, also an Angier B. Duke scholar, has an interest in theater. As President of Hoof 'n' Horn, Foster oversees Duke's student musical theater group, and he is currently directing their spring production of Cabaret. And as it does for Wood, theater offers Foster both a chance to challenge himself and a release from academics. "I would be demented if I didn't spend time doing theater," he says.
That's probably because when he's not directing plays, he's studying physics. One of two Duke students to win a Rhodes Scholarship next year, Foster studied at Oxford's mathematical institute last summer and will study physics at Oxford next year.
When Foster first came to Duke, he admits he cared too much about his grades. "I certainly came to Duke being obsessed with the quality of my GPA and viewing every [decrease] in my GPA as a massive disaster." Though he says he can't pinpoint exactly when his attitude changed, he knows by the spring semester of his junior year he was taking courses he knew he couldn't get A's in--including the second most advanced graduate-level physics course offered at the University (he received a B).
"By spring of junior year, I wasn't always doing as well as I would have expected quantitatively," Foster says, "but the degree to which I had progressed as a student of physics outweighed the negative impact on my GPA."
Foster says he believes had he continued to be caught up in grade point average through all of his Duke career, he wouldn't have received the Rhodes. "It would have stopped me from doing some things that helped me get the [scholarship]," he says, including taking the graduate course. "If you're too preoccupied with grades it blunts the possibility of being more daring academically and stops you from pushing yourself to do things where you might not do as well [quantitatively]. You need to feel free to try things, to overstep the bounds of, 'Am I prepared for this?'"
Foster also notes that competition for scholarships like the Rhodes are based much more on professors' assessments and on qualitative information professors provide than on GPA.
While Foster and Wood will go to England next year to study, senior Raimy Amasha has very different plans. Amasha, winner of the 2002 Undergraduate Award in Analytical Chemistry, says he is near the top of his class but hardly first, and has always put challenging himself academically at the top of his priority list. A chemistry major/history minor who writes poetry, plays tennis and lifts weights in his spare time, Amasha has already been accepted into three medical schools for next year. But he plans to defer a year--or possibly permanently--to work at a resort in Hawaii.
"Don't laugh," he warns, "but I'm really pretty sure I'm going to go. I pushed so hard in my undergraduate career and now I'm a little burnt out from academics." Amasha says he wants to be "free of heavy responsibility for a while. I figure a resort will be perfect."
Despite his more unconventional post-graduate plans, Amasha, like Foster and Wood, has challenged himself consistently throughout his Duke career. He says one of his favorite courses, and also one of the most challenging, was Shakespeare after 1600. Each summer in Amasha's native Oregon, his family would go to a Shakespeare festival, and, Amasha says, "I always enjoyed it but I didn't appreciate the depth of the plots and the characters. The class really stretched me." He says the hardest course he has taken has been Calculus 32--"It's the worst grade I've gotten at Duke"--and Biochemistry 228 is one of his favorites.
Of course, many of Duke's brightest minds do think about GPA, but at this stage in the game it is far from a priority. Senior Logan Allin admits he was at the top of the class "for a while," but since getting a job in New York, he's become uninterested in the competition and his GPA has dropped off. "The competition at the collegiate level comes from internal motivation--not so much for trying to be number one, but a drive to do well and be successful," he says. "Also, for people such as myself, academics can sometimes be viewed as a means to an end--a means to getting a good job or for others, a means to getting into a solid grad school. Competition amongst pre-meds has been well-documented, mostly due to med school selectivity based on class rank, but for us non-pre-meds, we want to do well, but we're concerned with getting the job or grad school acceptance and then living our real lives, post-graduation."
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.