Taking a cue from the foreigners

What's wrong with campus culture? I don't find social outlets-dry, wet or damp-limited or hard to find on campus. If I want to go to a big "party" where dozens of strangers get drunk on cheap beer, I can go to any one of the free, open section parties. If I want a similar situation with better drinks and a mechanical bull, there's always Shooters. If I want a smaller, more low-key party, I can visit friends' apartments. If I don't want to party at all, I live surrounded by people I'm happy to sit around and talk to. I have options.

This doesn't mean I haven't been known to complain sometimes about Duke. I really miss the lack of a bar scene, for example. This is not so much a question of campus culture, however, as of American culture. Duke's responsibility starts and ends with giving Elizabeth Dole the education she needed to become Secretary of Transportation. The normal complaints one finds in The Chronicle or student government (lack of intellectualism, non-alcoholic social opportunities.) are problems I've never encountered.

I found friends who were just nerdy enough for me before even the first day of orientation, during two of the best days of my life: international orientation. For 48 hours, I and a few dozen other international students sat, walked and joked around. The games we were made to play were often stupid. In one, we were asked to explain the genesis of our names. My own pithy narrative ("I'm called David because my parents liked the sound of it") perfectly illustrated how completely pointless the game was for most of us.

However, staring in bemusement at each other brought us together, and we discovered a few things that might otherwise have taken months to learn (I cite the answer one of my friends gave to this day-much to his exasperation). In those two days, I made several friends who are today among my closest.

As soon as the American freshmen immigrated to East Campus, I, like everyone else, was overwhelmed, and found it hard enough to sort out what people were called, let alone find my place in the rapidly forming community. But through it all, I could commiserate with the people I had met at international orientation on how the arrival of everyone else had destroyed the intimate, getting-to-know-you vibe of pre-orientation, and our initial contact soon blossomed into friendship. Soon, classes started, and I found a new group within which I could function: my Focus. In time, things settled down, and I made new friends in my dorm. I was home at last.

It is a shame to think this is not a universal experience. If what I read and hear is to be believed, there are many people at Duke who don't find a group of people with whom they are as comfortable until sophomore, junior or senior year-and some never do. I don't know how someone can go more than a few minutes at Duke without coming across an intellectual debate, or spend a weekend at Duke thinking there's nothing to do but drink. When I read Chronicle columns calling for students to build a social scene not defined by alcohol, I'm startled to discover some students don't know it's already out there.

It's time for Duke to give everyone my experience. We should dramatically expand the number and variety of pre-orientation programs. At this point, to my knowledge, the only pre-orientation programs are those for various scholarships, that for international students as well as Projects Wild, Surf and Build. Everyone I know who participated in any one of the above seems to have come out of it with friendships that have lasted to this day. Duke should partner with student groups to put together religious, theater, human rights, service and many other types of pre-orientation programming.

Another exciting possibility is to leverage existing Focus programs. Many programs already have mid-semester field trips that could be shifted or supplemented with another, pre-orientation trip, where students in a Focus could get to know each other and bond alone together before venturing forth into the dorm. Faculty need not even be involved in all of the programs. As a Humanitarian Challenges alumnus, I would love to facilitate something like this when the Focus program is resurrected next semester.