Column: Wisdom of the p-frosh

You can learn a lot from a p-frosh. I know we're the ones who are supposed to teach them about the ins and outs of college life, the secrets of success and so on, but sometimes it can be the other way around.

Because we spend eight months out of the year living at Duke, it's easy to lose touch with what it's like to live somewhere else. I'm not even talking about living in the "real world." What I mean is that we forget what made Duke different from other colleges and made us want to come here over the other places we visited.

I had a p-frosh visit early this week. It was a kid I knew from home who's looking at a bunch of top schools, the usual places for a kid from Northern New Jersey: Princeton, Yale, Penn, Duke, etc. Since he'd recently visited some of the other schools, he was looking at Duke through much different eyes than we do, since we've been spending all our time in the Gothic Wonderland for so long. And some of the things he noticed were enlightening.

In one of the classes he went to, I made a sarcastic comment when an ambitious freshmen asked an inane and useless question. The p-frosh said afterwards that at one of the other schools he visited (let's call it the "University of Xsylvania"), "almost everyone asked questions like that, trying to impress the professor, but they just ended up sounding ridiculous." We've all had a class with someone who repeatedly tried to show off what they knew, but most people here could not stand being in a class full of people like that. It's been said that we are not the "intellectual equal" of some of the Ivy schools, but if being their supposed "intellectual equal" means that everyone around feels the need to loudly display how smart they are, I'm not sure Ivy League intellectualism (and arrogance) is what we should be striving for.

In a similar vein, the p-frosh noticed how relaxed most people around here seemed. Granted, it's only the second week of the semester, and it does get pretty crazy come finals week, but it is true that most Duke students don't devote their life to their work--they do other things too. Sports, clubs, music, whatever, your average Dukie is a well-rounded person. I know Princeton, Harvard and Yale have plenty of people like this, but for a Top 10 school academically, we seem to specialize in allowing people to be more than the sum of their homework. Certainly, there are some of us who could afford to care a little more about class, but I think that living or dying by your grades and spending hours upon hours upon hours in the library studying are not necessarily desirable characteristics.

As the p-frosh was going around with me, talking to guys on my hall and to my friends in other dorms, he heard the usual complaints. "Parking is terrible," "Marketplace food equals death," and "un-air-conditioned dorms are hell on earth." Let's think about that a little bit. Our biggest problems with Duke are that people with cars have to walk far after parking them, we only get decent food freshmen year but have 20 plus places to choose from besides that, and for about a month at the beginning of the year, some of us need six fans on in our rooms.

Don't get me wrong, I personally have complained long and loud about all of those things, and would be dancing with joy if/when they were fixed, but they're not earth-shattering problems to have. Our rooms aren't the size of prison cells like at many schools, we have more than 10 restaurants that deliver to our rooms on food points (which you can't even get at home, nor at any other school), and at least we can all have cars on campus. Life isn't that bad. When I see stuff in the paper about problems at other universities, like Yale students having to deal with massive strikes and protests by their campus workers, or many kids at public universities being unable to find any classes to fit into their graduation requirements--both of which were articles in the New York Times in the last month, I feel a little better about the Marketplace and the Blue Zone.

I'm not saying we shouldn't talk about Duke's problems, or that we shouldn't try to fix them--I'm just saying we should appreciate what we do have here. We were all innocent little p-froshes once, and on our visit here, something about this place made us want to spend the next four years of our life at Duke. Maybe we'd all be a little happier if every once in while, we tried to remember that feeling.