For me, tech is the epitome of the contemporary American dream and while we love to pretend that it’s a perfect meritocracy, so much of achieving upward mobility is built on luck.
A more overarching predicament that afflicts the academic milieu at Duke University is the tendency toward an excessive degree of coddling.
Something has made me believe that I’m not allowed to enjoy life if I don’t look good while doing it. And it’s BS.
As Duke may yet again be kingmaker in future Triangle transportation initiatives, Duke students today should be aware of this history and grasp the unrealized power that lies in their collective voice.
We owe it to ourselves to let art fill our souls. To let conversations with other people make us see the world in new ways. To listen to music and look at an artwork and to watch a film from decades ago and know that people have felt happiness and sadness and anger and love and pain and loneliness the way we do, all along.
Living in abundance, then, is living with peace of mind. Only by defying the scarcity mindset — by sharing our knowledge with others, by helping one-another and by letting go of feelings of jealousy and remorse — can our Duke community live in harmony.
We devote a lot of attention to our athletes, scientists and entrepreneurs on campus, but it’s about time we offered the same respect to our musicians.
This is an unprecedented time for the state of our world. We are in an existential crisis. So we are going to Climate Commit, and we are going to do it hard. Harder than ever before.
Eating this dish feels like bathing in a health-and-wellness ocean of chlorophyll and vitamin C.
Pursue a passion and paradoxically, you’ll live.
As my infinitely wise psychiatrist told me, instead of thinking of all the ways something could go wrong, think about how it could go incredibly right.
Diversifying Duke is an issue of and not or. Striving for economic diversity does not mean we shouldn't also strive to make campus racially diverse as well.
In simple terms, DEI in the college process essentially attaches a certain “value” to our race, which backtracks the progress made by civil rights activists decades ago.
By letting go of monitoring the telltale signs of my peers’ political beliefs, I came to appreciate the input of every member. We had all come to class prepared, asked tough questions and treated each other with dignity.
We no longer find fault in a general crudity towards the words we speak and discount the value of politeness.
There’s a jack-of-all-trades aspect to clinical year that’s necessarily uncomfortable — in this environment requiring frequent shifts from specialty to specialty, change is the only constant.
If Duke, and our peer institutions, decided that the main basis for undergraduate admissions was students’ ability to play ping pong, suddenly every ambitious high schooler in the country would be practicing their serve.
My decision wasn't just about choosing to stay; it was about investing in the sense of home that Duke had become.
It’s possible to not be passionate about your job and find passion in other endeavors. You’re probably going to enjoy your life a lot less, though.
The New York Times casts us into the roles of pugilistic adversaries within the theater of a class-based struggle.
