Dear Dr. Monday,
With Blue Devil Days already underway, we need a little promotional material to help our prospective students get excited for Duke! Is there anyway you could whip up a short letter that we could hand out as they hit campus to welcome them? I’m a little busy over here licking stamps on waitlist and rejection envelopes.
Thanks,
Christoph “You Shall Not Pass” Guttentag
Chris,
Please see attached.
– Ya Boi Monday
P.S. Ever considered changing your name to Christopher? Way easier to remember.
Dear Prospective Student,
As part of Duke University’s ongoing effort to increase student yield, I am pleased to present you with “Dr. Monday’s Duke for Dummies: a P-frosh’s Guide to Campus.” Please note that the administration requires me to remind you that attending Stanford may cause cancer, and that the last page of this guide can also be used to make your first donation to the University.
Spring has sprung here at Duke! You may have noticed our grounds crews working hard to scrub the last vestiges of a long winter off campus, and they better do a damn good job now that they’re making $15 an hour. Some students have even taking to decorating campus for your arrival themselves—you may notice the small “A-Ville” tenting area set up to give all you little P-Frosh a small taste of Duke’s storied tradition of tenting and remind you that Duke University recently won an “A” for employee rights from the Qatari Ministry of Labor! Wow! Add that to Penn Pavilion’s recent sixth-place finish in the recent “Reverse Ranking of College Eateries” poll from U.S. News and World Report, and you’ll see that our desire for validation is limitless. Don’t bother actually trying the food, though—we have a sign right there to tell you how good it is. Yum!
What really matters in today’s economy though are jobs, jobs, jobs—whether you want to work 100 hours a week doing investment banking or consulting, Duke professors are trained to make sure you know how to handle cranky, aging white men better than the competition! Feel like majoring in something outside economics or engineering? Our career center staff is more than qualified to help fill out your federal food stamps application!
Yearning to know more about the academic experience? What better way to learn more about Duke than to hear a little about the Applied Theoretical Mathematics Department from one of its students, Abhishek Manahandras! (Psst—are you still reading this? Good. Now that we can speak freely, I can tell you were one of the good kids at your high school—a good student who would tell the teacher when the cool kids went out back to smoke some dope, right? Well, we’re looking for defenders of righteousness like you to join President Brodhead’s newly established Inquisitorial Squad to seek out the hooligans amongst your class who might be plotting against the University. Though we can’t compensate you for the program, we can offer you a signed letter of recommendation from Coach K after four years of service—what a resume builder!)
Anyways, thanks for that riveting proof of the Fibonacci Sequence, Abhi—just another example of the work going on in Duke classrooms every day! The Duke experience extends beyond the classroom, though, and into the city of Durham we call home. Whether dealing with neighbors after a fifth noise complaint or sharing a beer with a local Durhamite at 10 a.m. on the DATA bus, our students make an impact on their community. That’s why during your Orientation Week we’ll bus your whole class on over to the American Tobacco Campus, which is about as much a campus as American Tobacco is good for your health! Snap some pics to remember the place by, then hop back on the bus for a trip back to safety within the 3-foot-high walls of East—should you choose to walk, please remember that tuition is non-refundable in the event of your death!
We know you’ve heard about our scandals, from Asia Prime parties to high schoolers in porta-potties, but let us be clear—Duke is NOT a party school. Underage consumption of alcohol is illegal in North Carolina, and we truly enforce that. Well, except on LDOC. And Old Duke. And a few other concerts. And in K-Ville, as long as we’re playing a good team. But outside of these limited occasions, we’re cracking down across campus on risky behaviors like “ripping shots,” “pregaming” or “butt-chugging;” we’d rather you take it off campus, where we have some semblance of plausible deniability when the, well, vomit hits the fan. College students? Drink? Why, have you even read the Duke Community Standard, my friend?
With your bid acceptance to Duke comes great responsibility. We’re working every day to make Duke the best it can be, and your class is part of that commitment. From a plan to renovate the eyesore that is Central Campus to the renovation of the dorms on East, we’re all-in on Duke’s success, regardless of how that impacts your time here. The question, Class of 2020, is if you’re all-in too.
Please-come-here-so-my-degree-rises-in-value-ly,
Dr. M
Dr. Monday is currently conducting research into whether sorority girls sitting alone in the Link study rooms and their notes literally transform to the gaseous phase of matter and expand to fill the space containing them.
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