While most students are spending the last days of the semester finishing term papers or cramming for exams, a few students are completing atypical final projects.
This semester, a number of professors have assigned projects that have encouraged students to step away from their books and apply what they have learned to the broader Duke community.
Professor William Tobin's FOCUS class, Topics in Modern America, meets every Wednesday night to discuss issues involving social change. Tobin, a visiting associate professor of sociology, showed his students the movie Pay it Forward one week and asked them to apply its theme of doing good deeds to life at Duke.
Although Tobin's initial intention was academic in nature, students soon took the project one step further.
"We've been trying to figure out ways to better Duke," said freshman Reuben Goetzl.
In order to complete Tobin's assignment, Goetzl and some of his classmates decided to shuttle students directly between East and West campuses on two Thursday nights last month.
The idea was met with so much support from students that Goetzl and his classmates plan to continue the service on a regular basis.
"I learned about a different part of student life," Goetzl said. "We're going to start doing it every Thursday because we had so much fun."
Some students decided to tackle the task on a smaller scale. Tobin said he was equally impressed by the students who chose simply to comfort upset friends in their dormitories. "I wanted this to be as informal and unregimented as possible," Tobin said. "I wanted them to think about how social change occurs."
Freshman Jordan Giordano has not yet decided how he will pay it forward.
"It kind of has to fall into your lap," Giordano said of creating a unique project. "It's not really doing the assignment unless it's something significant."
Other professors have also encouraged their students to apply what they have learned in class to their own social interactions.
For a social psychology and personality class, sophomore John Kearney was required to act against the expectations of his peers for a day. He decided to be rude to everyone he encountered, ranging from his close friends to the servers at Alpine Bagels & Brews.
Kearney was able to see social psychology in action through the effect of his bad mood on peers.
"I was as offensive as I could be without making people suspicious," Kearney said. "By the end of the day, pretty much everyone was unhappy."
Kearney and his classmates said it was valuable to see classroom lessons working in the real world.
"It means more," said junior Lisa De Obaldia, who gave up her habit of consistently greeting her friends with hugs. "You don't have to research in books. You go through it."
Several students consider such out-of-the-ordinary projects to be welcome breaks from their typical workloads.
"I think you can learn more from these assignments than you could sometimes from essays or tests," Goetzl said.
Although the professors who assigned the projects may not have expected such enthusiastic reactions from their students, they were satisfied by the results.
"I was surprised by how eager they were to do things about it," Tobin said. "It was good for students to realize that there are consequences to the things they do."
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