By now, I’m sure the graduates of the greatest undergraduate class to grace the hallowed halls of Duke University since 2015 have comfortably settled in for a good few weeks...or months...maybe a gap year or two...of Netflix and Chill after a rough semester of pretending to do work, while squeezing in the last of the unofficial Duke graduation requirements. (Don’t think I didn’t hear your “muffled” murmurs in the Perkins stacks during reading period.)
The timeframe of your little staycation, of course, is fully dependent upon the start date of that prestigious upcoming job offer or fellowship or partially completed application to Abercrombie and Fitch that I’m sure each and every one of you snagged during Fall semester faster than you can say, “You goin’ out?”
Congratulations, by the way, on managing to achieve the one thing that everyone expected of you the moment you stepped foot onto East Campus. Well, unless you have a legitimate (and multimillion dollar) excuse for dropping out of school early because your name’s a reminder of a pop song people forgot (Mike who?) or you’re a 6-foot-5-inch benchwarmer turned buzzer-beating heartthrob whose name rhymes with “Chasin’ Gallon”—and I’m not referring to the La Croix you use to wash down your Crat on a given Wednesday night.
Assuming that you are neither, then go ahead and pat yourselves on the back for four years of heroically braving the treacherous journey from Edens to Main—excuse me, Abele—Quad, for selflessly stumbling out of bed by 8:20 a.m. in order to muster just enough attendance points to pass Italian 203 and gallantly convincing Shooters bouncers on many a night that your BFFL Kimmy would be truly heartbroken to hear that Durham authorities had received word of your fake ID.
Such feats are only attained with the utmost fortitude, self-discipline and character. Our peer institutions may have bigger endowments, higher rates of recruitment from the nation’s top consulting firms and more progressive stances on dismemberment of social hierarchies, but we Dukies possess something those nerds will never have: a nationally ranked sports team whose mascot doesn’t share its name with a popular autumn vegetable (no offense, Yale).
Speaking of things that have absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with the future success of any 2016 graduate who isn’t headed for the NBA (so like 0?), our favorite and most transparent Duke endowment, Mike Krzyzewski, had quite a bit to say on the matter during this year’s cleverly disguised university marketing event...er, “Commencement Ceremony.”
If you were semi-coherent during Coach K’s speech—and even he acknowledged that you probably weren’t—you may recall his gentle reminder that your A’s, published research, club presidencies and MCAT scores will always pale in comparison to the “hospital-volunteering, miracle-making, gold-s**tting” revenue machine otherwise known as the Duke men’s basketball team.
Okay, so he didn’t say those exact words. However, if Duke activist culture has taught me anything, it’s the importance of critically reading between the lines of any message put forth by a wealthy white male-identified person because he will almost certainly use his lack of melanin to prevent you from achieving your full potential as an individual who may or may not have Cherokee heritage on your mother’s half-brother’s side.
Thus, after an analysis that would given even the most outspoken Facebook ranter the warm fuzzies, I present you, Class of 2016, with the only gift my non-finance internship would afford me: a “TL;DR” version of Coach K’s ode to the greatness of Ay-son Ballin’ and Co., despite their inability to score a national championship this year (here’s looking at you, Harry Giles).
On a blissful day in early May, the winningest coach of all time articulates, “Life is like a basketball game, you never know what you’re gonna get…unless you’re one of the greatest coaches the world has ever seen and your annual recruitment process is always on fleek.” He later goes on to pronounce, “My team bad. My team hood. My team do stuff that your team wish it could.” However, this initial inspirational jargon was only the start of the groundbreaking discourse that rocked our worlds.
Class of 2016, add this to your sack of humble brags, “expect great things.” That’s right, by virtue of your alma mater’s most recent U.S. News Ranking of eighth (suck it, UPenn), you can safely assume that you won’t end up on the streets anytime soon—unless more of Wall Street’s dirty little secrets end up on your morning Skimm in the near future. The rest of you can sleep soundly in your Brooklyn apartments knowing that your spot at the corner card table at the nonprofit of your dreams isn’t going anywhere...at least until one of the wobbly legs collapses.
Anxious about making small talk in the real world with complete strangers for the rest of your living days? Fear not, my fellow worry-warts, for you went to Duke and that means having been blessed with the tremendous privilege of sharing the same gravel-strewn detours as the university's A-list celebrities—no, not the ones who have christened a particular West Campus bench for the practice of “suns out, guns out”—the taller ones! So forget the weather, you’ve always got a conversation topic stored up for a rainy day—pun intended.
Finally, Coach K urges you to conjure up memories from your middle school bullying assemblies—if only all those prepubescent haters could see your Duke diploma—and recall that there’s power in numbers. Before signing off, Coach K challenges all you real-world folk to tackle the world’s most critical issues as a team. While I consider this a valuable piece of advice, I personally think the Class of 2016 has already demonstrated its fair share of teamwork throughout the years.
Nothing says, “We’re all in this together...until I get a Super Day,” like your collective decision to designate Morgan-Stanley as the pinnacle of success. There’s also the time that you determined (as a group obviously) that uploading pics from the Asia Prime party was probably not the move to make. Or how about the pivotal moment when you all decided to leave the remnants of one last home game celebration in K-Ville like one, big dysfunctional family? It’s safe to say that you, my sixteeners, are #SquadGoals.
So, when you finally realize that the best four years of your life are really and truly over, remember that great things still lie ahead, follow your heart, it’s all about a good attitude, failure is inevitable, surround yourself with decent (preferably wealthy) people, there’s always graduate school and, most importantly, you’ll never, ever be Grayson Allen.
This millennial would like to inform Coach K that if he is still looking for a basketball manager who’s been to about as many games as there were Russian Majors in the graduating class, DM me.
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