Precisely what constitutes a happy devil?
Freshman Ted Yavuzkurt seems to be the portrait of a Duke student in distress. Hunched over a mess of notes and formulas, his brow furrowed and his hand cramping from solving for one determinant too many, he's already failed one exam for his Linear Algebra course and he has another looming: it's crunch time.
But matrices, formulas and midterm grades aside, Yavuzkurt wouldn't deny his happiness as a Duke student for one second.
"It's a really good environment to be a college student in," he said with a smile. "It's tough, but I wouldn't like to go through it anywhere else."
At a meeting of the Arts and Sciences Council Jan. 17, Larry Moneta, vice president for student affairs, said 10 to 12 percent of the student body now takes advantage of Counseling and Psychological Services-perhaps an indication that happiness is evading at least a small fraction of the student body.
The Princeton Review designates the 20 happiest and unhappiest campuses, based on student surveys, in each edition of its annual tell-all college guidebook. As in years past, Duke failed to make either of the 2008 lists.
Gary Glass, coordinator for outreach and developmental programming for CAPS, said he was reluctant to take the findings of the Princeton Review's survey too seriously, but wasn't surprised that Duke fell somewhere in the murky middle ground on the barometer of student morale.
He said the happiness of the Duke student body is a dynamic emotion influenced by any number of factors-dipping when the women's basketball team fell victim to the Tar Heels, only to spike when the men's team grabbed the ram by the horns just two days later-and any given student's assessment of their mood can vary on the hour.
For a type-A student body insistent upon control and stability, Glass said he fears the inherent fluidity of happiness can be a source of great frustration.
"Happiness for me is based on a complicated mix of things, which makes it hard to be happy all the time," sophomore Jessica Gushner said.
Trying to discern the best path through Duke's academic halls can also put a damper on student happiness, swaying students with affinities for more whimsical fields to bite the bullet and go pre-medicine, business or law, Glass said.
"In high school, the big competition was what college you could get into, but now at the university level everyone says they want to be a doctor or an astrophysicist," Yavuzkurt said. "You don't want to get out of college and go directly to working at the loading dock."
Many ultra-motivated Blue Devils speak of happiness and success interchangeably, as if the two were one and the same, Glass said. For these students, a drive to succeed trumps an interest in happiness.
Sophomore Sara Womble, for example, said she has probably valued success above happiness in her time at the University thus far, "but it's made me happy. One kind of contributed to the other."
In times when papers and finals aren't looming, the classroom can be a great source of joy, students said.
Freshman Alex Klein said he has enrolled in an assortment of interesting classes to expose himself to the broadest range of subject matter in his first year.
"Some of the things that come out of my professors' mouths just make me so happy to be here," he said.
Diligence in the classroom can be balanced by reckless abandon on the bar at Shooters, but this debauchery is not always the most fulfilling form of social interaction for students.
"To be honest, going and partying all the time is a really short-term happiness," Yavuzkurt said. "And even when I'm doing something like that, I'm not all that happy-I'm just playing the escapist card."
Womble said pressure to abide by the "work hard-play hard" mentality left her socially unsatisfied as a freshman.
"I never really go to parties or anything, so I guess I was least happy freshman year when I was trying to fit into the culture," she said. "I felt kind of isolated, especially because living on East Campus means being stuck on East Campus. Sophomore year, I've been able to find people with more similar interests."
Drawing from her own experience as a Duke student, Dean of Students Sue Wasiolek, Trinity '76, said it often takes time for freshmen to find their place on campus.
"My first year at Duke was a tough adjustment for me," she said. "If you had asked me if I was happy back then I would have said no. It was just that I needed some time to adjust to a very different place, and once I adjusted I never left."
This sense of belonging, a connection to the campus that must often be fortified outside the classroom, is something most happy students share, Glass said.
"I have a good group of friends," sophomore Allie Sommer said. "I have my sorority, I like going to the [Freeman Center for Jewish Life]. I feel like there are a lot of places where I have roots, even if they're not all connected."
And once in place, these ties can cultivate a deep sense of pride for the University among students. Moneta said he has never been on a campus where more students sported their school's gear.
Whether a devil emblazoned on a T-shirt or a towering icon of campus architecture, classic emblems of Duke bring smiles to students' faces, he said.
"When I'm on the bus driving up Chapel Drive and I get the view of the Chapel, that's when I'm happiest," Klein said.
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