Swoosh, green light, "click."
That simple sound of swiping a DukeCard through a card reader has been a part of my Duke experience since the first day of move-in. But soon enough my DukeCard will no longer open most doors on West Campus, give me nighttime access to the library or connect me to a seemingly inexhaustible declining balance of Monopoly-like money called "points."
It will be strange at first. This plastic companion with a goofy off-center picture of an excited high school senior has followed me faithfully through my meandering college career. It was with me when I miserably failed my first orgo exam, when I became a full member of my fraternity and when the basketball team won the national championship. A memento of days passed by, it will now be retired for good--not to a temporary summer spot in the back of my billfold but out of it completely.
To many, a DukeCard is nothing more than a means to an end. It's a way to access the pipeline to the family's bank account, to gain entrance to a hallowed shrine of college basketball or to expediently wash five loads of laundry.
But to me, it's always been much more than that. The DukeCard is a symbolic "Admit One" ticket into the intellectual theme park that is the Gothic Wonderland. And it is a very expensive one, too--you can get a new card for $10, but the all-caps lettering below your name that says either Trinity College or School of Engineering eventually ends up costing over $100,000.
As holders of this expensive ticket, one important privilege is conferred upon us--the opportunity to roam freely around the Gothic Wonderland. In this sense the Duke experience is on the broadest level a matter of picking and choosing how to fill the thousands of hours you will eventually spend on this campus. The general hope is that in addition to the skills needed to make a living in the world outside these stone walls, you will find out what you do well and what you enjoy doing.
Still, I sincerely believe that the main purpose of it all, even if it costs upwards of $100,000, should be to have fun.
I understand how childishly naive this last statement sounds. The notion of coming to college to have fun is most commonly associated with immature kids whose parents pay more in taxes than the gross income of a small town. On the other side of the spectrum, for some students the idea of "fun" is something reserved for underachievers and lazy do-nothings from schools with geographic designations in their names--to imply that Duke was fun is to open yourself up to criticisms that the path you chose to follow to the completion of your degree was the easy one.
As truth in advertising, I should mention that some attractions in the Gothic Wonderland are more intense than others. Honestly, be it physics, chemistry or biomedical engineering, I found that I didn't have the stomach for many of the rides. I came to this school thinking that I wanted to be a doctor but quickly switched my intended major after discovering that writing papers and researching international relations topics was personally a lot more rewarding than memorizing stacks of notes on how glycolysis eventually converts glucose to dihydroxyacetone phosphate and D-glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate. Compared to such organic chemistry lectures that felt like rides on the "Tower of Terror," attending political science and history classes was akin to hopping into a boat on "It's a Small World."
Still, whether you stroll to class with nothing more than a notebook and a pen in your hand or dutifully grind it out in the basement of Teer with a bookbag full of labs and problem sets, it all comes down to enjoying the full privileges of living inside this intellectual theme park. To effectively "study abroad" in this miniature Magic Kingdom where communism is still alive and equality seems like an attainable goal is the incredible opportunity awarded to each of us. The challenge that we are left with is to create a comfortable balance between all the myriad attractions that Duke has to offer.
How we end up approaching this challenge is the ultimate test of our college education.
In the end, I can honestly say that my time at Duke has been a blast. So live it up and do what you can to be able to confidently utter this same phrase when your graduation date arrives.
Swoosh... but this time, a red light and no "click."
Rejected.
No matter--even the most expensive of admission tickets have to expire eventually.
Marko Djuranovic is a Trinity senior and a former health and science editor of The Chronicle.
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