Profs connect with Students

Introduction
Overall I guess your average Duke student isn’t probably the friendliest of people. There is a lot of snobbery; there are a lot of cliques, and things like that. Really it’s not terribly hard to find people like you if you’re not like that. If you are snobby, then I guess you’ll find you’re place here too.

Campus Life and Social Life
My first impression is that it’s ridiculously gorgeous, and that I was kind of scared cause I perceived it as a little homogenous – a lot of rich white people – a lot of frat boy type people – a lot of conservatives – not very much diversity but that’s come to change I think. The way that Duke works all the freshman are on East campus and everyone else is off campus or on West campus. So I think it’s kind of nice you start off with all the freshman around you. It sort of decreases the intimidation of first coming to college when you meet people that are in the same position as you. Some rooms are air conditioned, some aren’t- its ridiculously hot here in the summer so you should pretend that you have asthma or something if you’re coming here because it’s really hot. Make sure you get an air conditioned room! Academics
The literature program here is absolutely phenomenal. It mainly focuses on critical theory and Marxist thought and stuff like that. It’s actually ranked top nationally for this program. My professors so far have been phenomenal. Even the classes that I’ve had that have Grad students teaching are still amazing. The classes tend to be pretty small. Even my biggest lecture class was my Marxism class was only like 65 people or something. And they always break out into smaller sections on Fridays. So even if you had a lecture class you still get to have smaller discussion environments at least 1 day a week. It a pretty good system. There are a lot of super star professors here. Even though there’s people that are academic superstars, they still have the time to talk to undergraduates and have office hours and be real professors, which I really admire.

Student Body
Even the people I hang around with, kind of a highly gay, alternative living sort of crowd – they still have obsessively watched basketball when it’s in season. Basketball just brings the campus together.

In Closing...
The facilities here are absolutely phenomenal. The resources Duke has for students are pretty amazing too, I think it’s totally worth it the tuition to come here. Duke definitely puts the money to good use.