Sculpted

Last semester, I made a choice many upperclassmen would regard as a Total Freshman Move—something masochistic, fruitless or just plain dumb.

No, I didn’t gather 11 random people from my hallway and willingly forgo an insulated dorm room that was costing my parents thousands of dollars so that I could subject myself to two miserable winter months of sleeping outside in a tent. Nor was I presumptuous enough to sign up for Chemistry 23L, an accelerated general chemistry course that made no use of a real textbook or any concepts that I assumed to be tangentially related to chemistry. I didn’t even pound six shots of Aristocrat vodka in 20 minutes and subsequently attempt to ride the bull at Shooters II.

So what was my TFM? Enrolling in Economics 51.

Granted, I took Econ 51 on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis and was thereby not under the same pressure to perform as my fellow classmates. But taking an introductory weed-out course as a senior is an altogether different experience from enrolling in one as a freshman. As my classmates frenetically took notes with three different colored pens, felt disheartened after receiving curt replies to their long-winded questions from Lori Leachman and exhibited seizure-like gestures in the minutes preceding the exams, I observed them as a nostalgic spectator with calm reserve. They still had the illusion that Duke was a balancing act: that they could be in control. Duke gave them the ingredients, and they were to precisely follow the steps of their own perfectly crafted recipes.

Once, I sat behind a pair of girls discussing their plans for the coming week. One I learned was pre-med, the other currently enamored with her long-distance boyfriend from high school. I rolled my eyes, mentally computing the odds of both maintaining these trajectories throughout college. There’s about a 33 percent chance that the pre-med will stay her course. As for the one in a long-distance relationship, the best she has going for her is luck. I don’t mean to be overly judgmental, just realistic: I personally came in with both—a boyfriend and an eye on medicine—and am leaving with neither.

When I arrived at Duke, I had definite goals, a set path and relatively straightforward notions of morality, relationships, equality and sex. I was, and to some degree still am, notorious for compartmentalizing different facets of my life. I thought I could always draw a clear, impassable line between personal and professional, reason and emotion, and attraction and attachment. I’ve learned—often by hurting myself or someone else—that when it matters most I usually cannot even pretend such lines exist. And on those rare occasions when I can make definite distinctions, they are almost irrelevant because boundaries will be crossed regardless.

Many of us would like to think we got here based on a procedure that has been perfected over decades. Yet, the admissions process is one constantly in flux, shaped in large part by the applicant pool and shifting institutional priorities. And once we get here, the game doesn’t change all that much. We come into this world-renowned University thinking there is some formula we can manipulate, hoping to tweak it enough so that we simultaneously maximize our college experience and achieve a desirable career outcome. But instead of carefully abiding by a predetermined path, we are often caught off guard and forced to react before we act and change course. Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Christoph Guttentag once told me that he “sculpts” the class in finalizing admissions decisions. As students, we don’t have that luxury. We don’t sculpt our Duke experience as much as it sculpts us.

To all the prospective freshmen out there, don’t let your tour guides deceive you. Duke is anything but a place of balance, and I’m still hard-pressed to find anyone that can simultaneously excel in academics, extracurricular activities and a social life. I entered Duke as a well-rounded student expecting a well-rounded education, and the last four years of my life have been extreme in multiple senses. I’ve been brutally awakened to concerns of gender, race and socioeconomic status. I’ve become passionate enough about a subject to pursue a five-year Ph.D. program in the field, and I’ve made lifelong friends that are genuine, quirky, brilliant, caring and willing to make fools of themselves when other people say it’s inappropriate to do so.