Summing it down

I don't sum up. Summing up is something you do at the end of summer camp, when the counselors make you play "One Rose and One Thorn" or whatever catchy nickname has been assigned to oversimplifying experience nowadays. Summing up is for overly emotional high school girls at the end of prom night. Summing up is poorly retelling something that has already happened in a manner that doesn't begin to capture the complexity of what actually happened (See: Tyler Hansbrough post-game interview).

Unfortunately, the requests come pouring in around this time of year for concise summaries of the Duke experience. Parents, peers at peer institutions and pre-frosh all want to know about living life like a Cameron Crazy; I consider telling them I learned alliteration in Writing 20: Aristocrat and Assessment of American Alcohol. Answering broad-based questions about college is an exercise in futility: You are going to neglect something essential or include something insignificant in your answer, regardless of how well thought-out or cleverly crafted it is. A 3,000-plus page book at Perkins only begins to address the myriad questions regarding the nature of student life at this University. Duke makes most of our dreams a legitimate possibility, but those who aspire for a user-friendly ACES or a short answer to, "How was school?" should prepare to be disappointed. Packaging a year at Duke into a simple explanation, or even a 24-hour seminar, is simply unfeasible, and therein lies the chief failing of Blue Devil Days.

Any criticism of Duke's sales pitch to accepted students, however, should be preceded by an evaluation of the program's purpose and its merits. The goal from the administration's standpoint is obviously to get the people they pegged as Duke material to commit here. Fair enough. Thus, the function of each student host is to do whatever is possible (within the bounds of the law) to ensure a pre-frosh picks Duke over anywhere else he or she may be considering. I got my kid laid. Mission accomplished. Duke was triumphant in its fine purpose of recruiting strong undergraduates to a strong university, and my pre-freshmen and I had an excellent time. Any venture wherein an organization seeks a noble cause and its members also thoroughly enjoy themselves is one I support.

Despite the importance of building a strong student base, the fact remains that the ability to recruit top talent in no way suggests a completely transparent recruiting process. Indeed, everyone who has ever fallen under the spell of Roy Williams and committed to UNC was, I'm sure, shocked to find the prevalence of illiteracy on campus. Perhaps because we value their talents so much, the visiting pre-frosh have not been given a wholly accurate presentation of what it's like to go here. During Blue Devil Days, myth, to a certain extent, supplants reality in Duke's attempt to woo potential suitors. The bus stop is not always void of thronging crowds. The Marketplace is not a five-star, all you-can-eat restaurant. Shooters is not heaven on earth (more a purgatory accompanied by Katy Perry's "Hot N' Cold"). Blue Devil Days are a classic case of information asymmetry, and while the freshman hosts are expected to act as arbiters of truth, there's only so much we can do to ensure our task is met.

Even if we somehow did possess the power to present our younglings with perfect information about Duke, we would run into the same aforementioned problems associated with summing up a year of experience. In addition, each host and his/her friends have vastly different answers to questions. A pre-frosh who asks, "What's the biggest lesson you learned freshman year?" might just as likely be answered with, "The importance of attending office hours," as "How to properly shotgun." As no typical Duke student exists in the first place, the only way to get a feel for what freshman year is like is to ask an insanely large number of people (many of whom will give disjointed and inaccurate answers). The problem of information asymmetry is, in this case, unsolvable.

Thankfully, an unsolvable problem does not imply a lack of interest in the equation itself. The fact that prospective freshmen cannot perfectly idealize their existence at Duke will not hinder them from coming here in the first place: On the contrary, curiosity will drive future enrollment. Blue Devil Days are largely successful in swaying undergraduates to sign on: It is the primary reason I, and many of my classmates, are here now. I merely hope that the administration and student hosts may one day realize the fallacy of summing up an entire experience into a day or two, and simply offer all facets of Duke-the Chapel, the broken ePrints, the beauty of K-ville, the dysfunctional ACES and Wallace the Omelet Guy-to those who have the privilege of choosing to wear blue. That about sums it up.

Ben Brostoff is a Trinity freshman. This is his last column of the semester.