I sat through a very pregnant pause after my professor’s long, introductory rant in my first class ever at Duke. So long that my fellow classmates awkwardly stared at one another, unsure if they had just managed to miss some sort of instruction. Those first few weeks had been noisy chaotic ones, so the silence—no matter how oddly deafening, or confusing—surely was a relief. I had just transferred from state school, and was adjusting to the hustle of daily life in the gothic wonderland.
There were times in those early days at Duke when I felt like a foreigner who had managed to slip in under the radar. My DukeCard was valid, for sure. But my presence on campus still felt fake, like I could stop studying and be whisked away back to reality at any moment. It took months for that imposter feeling to go away, and over a year for me to feel like I really belonged. But in that moment—that long, awkward pause after my professor introduced himself I did the one thing I should not have. I leaned over, smiled at the girl sitting next to me, and asked her a question.
“What’s McKinsey?”
She laughed. I didn’t know why. Our professor had spoken about this mystery company ad nauseam when discussing his resume. Everyone nodded along in agreement as if to beckon his visiting-professorship validated as worthy by this experience.
“It’s a part of the big three,” she told me, her voice steeped in the most subtle of sarcasm. “You know, consulting?”
I might as well have tattooed my forehead with the phrase “Transfer Student: Not From Around Here, Handle With Care.” But the worst part was that this wouldn’t be the last of my gaffes as I transitioned from “thoughtful member of the real world” to “stereotypically Duke student.” I bungled my way through conversations filled with ski slopes in Colorado I’d never heard of, prep schools name drops, and camps in the Northeast to which I had no connection. I went into senior year still fairly unsure of what Biomedical Engineering and investment banking at Goldman Sachs actually were. Once in those early days when somebody told me they were from the Bay Area, I—an intellectual—astutely asked:
“What Bay?”
Immersing yourself as a Duke student into the campus culture elicits a certain amount of new knowledge. After all, just learning the acronyms that describe places around campus is an undertaking in and of itself. But slowly, the phrases—LSRC, BC, C1, LDOC, PUMP, etc.—seep into your brain until you speak the language as fluently as anyone else. And along with those acronyms come a lot of other ideas that soon become all too familiar—the big three, the key three, the rivalries and personalities of individual Manhattan prep schools, the ability to rank all top-14 law schools in order, coffee and craft beer flavor profiles, and perhaps my favorite—the ability to complain about literally anything, no matter the quality. Your school builds a $90 million, state-of-the-art dining hall that resembles a cruise ship more than it does a student center? No problem. The locally roasted and sourced coffee still tastes pretty burnt and the sushi was kind of subpar.
None of this is meant to convey that I wasn’t an active participant in those sorts of behaviors and activities that incite the guttural “ugh” the rest of the world exudes when they hear the word “Duke.” After all, I ran an unsuccessful campaign for student body president then turned on the student body and wrote an anonymous, semester-long column making fun of them. That’s why it pains me to write this column: my inaugural opener in a brief, 4-part reprieve from my status as “Active Participant: Civil Society.” I’ll revisit my favorite topics in a different role—this time as a young, barely-adult Duke alumni. But if my short lived stint in the wild that is life outside Durham has taught me anything, it can be summed up in one, concise (AP Style!) headline.
Real world notably bereft of Larry Moneta.
The amenities of Duke—whether they be intellectual opportunities, physical spaces, real concepts, or imagined fantasies—promise a world of grandeur where quite literally anything is possible. The dream of Terry Sanford is alive and well in Durham, where Larry Moneta routinely conceptualizes multi-million dollar ideas and David M. Rubenstein bankrolls them into reality. Even cities like Washington, DC, that have been greatly aided by the kiss of Rubenstein’s bank account, can’t compare to the idea of Duke’s campus where you can try out pretty much anything, risk-free, with absolutely no consequences.
An afternoon in an art museum can’t compare to a semester of art history with a leading expert in the field. A tour of the Capitol Building will be cool, but a course on the history of civic engagement in the US will go deeper. Want to try out conservatism? Great, Duke’s got a couple of people who also like that! Want to learn how to golf? Awesome, Duke is also interested in advancing your future career in lobbying. We have as many video editing studios as we do students from the mountain west and enough student publications that you could be an editor-in-chief every semester at Duke.
There is no greater place to appreciate culture and discourse than the ground zero that is a college campus. There are spaces and outlets out here in the “real world” for those sorts of things, for sure, but they aren’t as disposable and as easily reachable. It’s hackneyed, but I wish—if only for a second— that I could have paused the moments that mattered in order to savor them more. There are people I want to hug closer, food I wanted to savor longer, and—believe it or not—class discussions I want to hold onto to absorb just a few more points of view.
I don’t have remaining time at Duke to incorporate this mentality, but you do.
The aftertaste of a cup of burnt Vondy coffee has finally escaped me, but I can’t help but wish I’d had a few more.
Annie Adair is a Trinity alumna. Her column typically runs on alternate Fridays.
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Annie Adair is Trinity '17. Her column, "duke, forward," runs on alternate Fridays.