My gut, my pioneer

Good things come from trusting your instincts. I know it when I am hollering at Egypt score against Italy on a 32-inch TV screen with 100 belligerent Sierra Leonean men. We are thinking nothing and feeling only raw emotion, strong as a bullet, knocking in our guts and in our heads.

The same visceral feeling builds when riding on a motorcycle 27 miles in elbow-deep bush, and when trudging through rivers with pants rolled, socks and shoes in hand. Hunger rises like Wonderbread, as do disappointment, frustration and thirst, which mixes into a weary cocktail of emotional confusion that comes with community-building and data collection. The sensations are real, the heat is real, the lizards that fall from the ceiling and land in your hair are real.

I have Duke to thank (and blame) for this trip. Until late in my junior year, my box was Durham, and many a decision I yielded to reason at the expense of instinct.

Fortunately help was there when I decided to pursue an impulse. A Duke friend, now working as a director for Beefreed, a beekeeping company, nudged me into Sierra Leone for a rural finance internship. On my third day, I drove past a Duke student leading a Robertson Scholars program. I commiserate with another Dukie who is teaching here, and correspond with a Duke Professor in Tanzania about my thesis research there next month. Duke has provided financial support for both trips, and neither from DukeEngage.

Short of this impromptu network, there are plenty of Dukie gut-thinkers, free-wheelers, pioneer-doers and fortune-seekers elsewhere, shredding the walls of their boxes and landing in uncharted, sometimes hostile, territory. You'll find them as Admissions Ambassadors preparing to welcome about 1,720 students to the Class of 2013. They are founders of the "One Duke, United" campaign, lobbying campus to put an end to minority recruitment weekends, or Students of the World, filming a documentary in the Amazon. They are Davis Foundation grantees implementing projects of peace, kooky talents in Small Town Records and researchers in the lab and field, from the heart of the Pentagon to the edges of Papua New Guinea.

Now, I know that few students will be driven by instincts as specific as these. In the first week or month here, you'll be living off a different set of impulses. The speeches you'll hear will appear as a pile of saccharine words that do not inspire you about the next four years because you're thinking only of your first parent-free night of stale frat beer and hormone-heavy commons rooms. Push aside all the tiresome hubbub and just take away this: starving your gut is a losing game. If there's one thing Duke can give you, it is the security of knowing that your gut pursuit is worth supporting.

But when you reach your senior summer, you'll look back and think-Duke, I miss her. You'll long for Southern evenings wet and warm as a lover's mouth, and for the accompanying soft humidity that leaks out of the shadows and settles in droopy mounds under lamps and Gothic tracery across West Campus. You'll think of it as a magical place where cats groom downy paws on paths of stone, midnight couples swap injuries in alcoves and glass ponds house perennial fowl, pausing, homeward-bound.

We will agree; Duke is a lovely place to roost. But just as you followed your instincts when you applied, trust your gut and pursue what drives you when you're here and when you venture out. Take my words for whatever they're worth: If you've signed up for this crazy, mixed-up four-year trip, your hunch is true. This is your place. Welcome home.