Apply for a column

I want you to apply for a column because, in short, you know things the rest of this University does not.

Let me explain.

Anyone who attends a university for a few semesters will naturally feel an idealistic impulse to claim they know it inside and out.

The modern university has become so impossibly huge that it’s entirely feasible two college graduates will have absolutely nothing in common outside of the obvious. Duke is no exception. Academic overlap between students is in no way a given, as Curriculum 2000 grants undergraduates the power to fulfill graduation requirements in a countless number of ways (although, rightfully so, it’s still bashed for being too restrictive). With 6,000-plus undergraduates, there’s any number of niche social groups one could fall into that would completely differentiate his or her experience from a comparable peer. Of those 6,000 undergrads, Cameron’s student section can only house about a third, so the increasingly popular “basketball brings us together” argument is at best an advertising gimmick. Duke facilitates extremely stratified student experiences. Consequently, you writing 800 words about your time here would be infinitely different from me writing 800 words about mine.

This little fact is what makes the back pages such a valuable part of The Chronicle. Five days a week, you’re afforded the opportunity to gain new insight about the university from three of your peers and/or a faculty member, alum, administrator or other significant Duke personality. There is virtually no limit to the uniqueness of these insights. Over the past two years, reading this section has provided me with knowledge about the pressures of attending college as an illegal alien, the merits of the Troubled Assets Relief Program from the vantage point of a Duke economics professor and the hesitancy of an alum about Duke’s expansion in China. It has been my window into the myriad aspects of Duke I can never hope to know on a personal basis. As Editorial Page Editor for Volume 106, I hope to make it yours.

What will afford me the opportunity to achieve this goal is you. And by “you,” in no way am I strictly referring to the undergraduate reader. I take you in this instance to mean not only undergraduates, but anyone who can represent even the slightest part of the Duke experience, so long as it’s from a unique angle.

Fortunately, for the aspiring columnist in the Gothic wonderland, there is no shortage of these angles. One need not be a supremely engaged extracurricular protégé to be a skilled writer who can construct a cohesive column. Simply the ability to generate original content and present it in a structured manner will suffice for the job. The rest is practice. Indeed, there are perhaps few other ventures at Duke that can give you as thorough a grounding in creativity, research and writing as penning a weekly or biweekly column.  

So, I invite everyone at least tangentially affiliated with Duke, from any walk of life here, to apply for a column for next semester. I want to read about a professor’s attempts to reform his or her academic department. I want to know what it is exactly a biomedical engineering student studies and the consequences of these studies for the future. I want to learn the precise details of another culture from a student studying abroad, and how this culture compares to Duke’s own. In short, I want to absorb the spectrum of experiences possible at Duke: in this manner, the backpages can begin to encapsulate the enormity and complexity of Duke itself, if not make sense of it.

Ben Brostoff is a Trinity sophomore and the Editorial Page Editor for Volume 106. E-mail him for a columnist application at bmb21@duke.edu. Applications are due April 23.