The end
(04/27/15 8:05am)
Writing this column has been shamelessly self-indulgent, but I’d be remiss to define my final semester of college in any other way.
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Writing this column has been shamelessly self-indulgent, but I’d be remiss to define my final semester of college in any other way.
I remember feeling weirdly alien with the word Duke across my chest as a freshman. I had stumbled upon some world I wasn’t made for, where people painted masterpieces on plastic coolers and put fried chicken on their waffles like that made any sense at all and said hello to me on the street without an ulterior motive. They even understood how basketball worked—like, fouls and everything—and came in knowing Miles from Mason from Marshall. It was all intimidatingly foreign.
My babysitters in elementary school were a series of undergrads from a local university. To five-year-old me, they were ancient. Eighteen, even! Legal adults, so potentially married—or about to be—definitely with a linear life-plan ahead. I mean, they showed up at my house, alone, in a car, with their very own beepers—keep in mind this was 1998. Their independence was terrifyingly thrilling.
I’ll let you in on a little secret about me: I was waitlisted at Duke. There’s an unwritten column somewhere within me that describes how I initially put up roadblocks in my own way to support a self-fulfilling expectation that I wasn’t good enough, but that’s not what this column is about. I used to be really good at that. But this is a column about making the decisions that drive our lives and the way we think about these decisions.
We’re incredibly fortunate to go to a university that the public seems to pay attention to and care about. Yet as a second-semester senior, I’ve noticed that our campus gets national media attention most consistently for two categories of events—sensationalized controversies and sports. And since spring is high season for scandal at Duke, like clockwork we’re already catching our share of coverage after a remarkably quiet fall semester.
Catching up with my grandmother over winter break, I shared some of my highlights at Duke. I rattled off my favorite aspects of collegiate life and mentioned having had the privilege of meeting people from all over the world both while on campus and far from it. The diversity of their perspectives, though not directly a part of my formal Duke education, is an unanticipated benefit that has meant as much to me as any classroom learning did. While listening to me sharing these things, my grandma interrupted—“My goodness, Elissa, your world is so much larger than I knew could be possible at 21.”
TEL AVIV, Israel—For my last undergraduate summer, all I wanted was a memorable adventure and a meaningful experience I could carry with me to the “real world.” So when the decision came to either take a corporate internship in San Francisco or to work in Tel Aviv for the summer, I knew in my gut what I wanted.