Use the fields below to perform an advanced search of The Chronicle's archives. This will return articles, images, and multimedia relevant to your query. You can also try a Basic search
30 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
Waiting at a gate in Brussels Airport in Zaventem, Belgium, McSwain Forkoh first realized something was wrong when he saw a horde of people running towards him.
While many Duke students settled into summer internships last May, three undergraduates drove almost 8,000 miles across the country in a yellow school bus.
A male Coquerel’s sifaka lemur was born at the Duke Lemur Center during the snowstorm Saturday.
There is an incident I always think about whenever people tell me that it must have been easy to adjust to Duke after coming from a Western country. As an overly enthusiastic first-year, I found myself standing in front of the hundred members of Duke Student Government trying to explain why I would be most appropriate for a representative role on SOFC, the school’s funding committee. It was a job that sounded appropriately glorious, and I thought about how best to portray myself to the Senate at large.
When I think of the things I’ve regretted, so many of them come down to things I wish I had said or things I had done. There would be situations where I’d feel the words on the tip of my tongue, sentences already formed and ready to go, but I never said them. Or situations where I’d see something happening and my feet would slow, but I never stopped. The reason why would come down to a single second when I thought about saying what was on my mind. Always, there was a moment of resistance and hesitation. In that infinite second, I had time to contemplate all the ways I could be misinterpreted. And I would let it silence me and go on, saying nothing. The moment would pass, and I would go on with my day. The classmate would never know how much I admired them, the old friend would never know how much I missed her and my parents would never know how much I needed them. It didn’t even matter how badly I’d want to share these things. That moment of hesitation, and the instinct to heed it, was enough to let any opportunity slide away.
When I first told my mother that I had been accepted into Duke University, she went pale. We were sitting around the small tabletop in our kitchen in Australia sipping tea. I don’t know why, but all the important conversations of my life were around this tabletop. She congratulated me, as did my father. “But four years is a long time,” he said.
I used to see this girl around campus all the time. When I was late for class, running down Towerview Road, she would be on the other side of the road, walking sedately. She would be holding a salad in front of me in line at Au Bon Pain or sitting in the library on the first floor, books spread around her. I knew nothing about her, except that she seemed to be everywhere I was, and she was always dressed impeccably, with her hair falling behind her in a shining mass. She never smiled very much. I thought her the epitome of the type of girl I both despised and admired—beautiful, exclusive and untouchable. In my head, she had a group of three glamorous friends and would go to Cancun with them during spring break. She would depend on her beauty to manipulate people into doing things for her. I had met girls like her before, and so I dismissed the possibility of ever being her friend. Months later, when I had forgotten about her existence, we were put together on a group assignment. It was only then that I discovered how wrong I was about everything, on all counts.
The most idealistic I have ever felt was the summer I turned 21 in a small but famous city called Oxford. I was there to take a class on Victorian literature and essentially enjoy the benefits of taking an Oxford course without actually having to take an Oxford course. It was my first brush with the culture of the ancient empire that spawned the inception of my own home country. It seemed the city, imprinted with the ideas of the brightest minds in history, was built for learning. It was possible to sit where C.S. Lewis once sat and get a pint of beer. Of course, there were papers to be written and criticisms to be read, but mostly it was a time of late sunsets and long walks in grassy meadows and Pimms filled to the brim with cut strawberries. I met many people. The locals kept telling us that the warm summer nights were unusual and wouldn’t last, but they did—all summer long.
There are some things I have learned to expect when traveling through European hostels. The wifi will likely be spotty in the upstairs rooms. One of the hostel bedmates will inevitably snore. A group of rowdy Australians will probably appear in the communal living room when least expected. And if traveling alone, long wait times and daunting groups of people can sometimes mean that there are hours and hours stretching ahead where you must keep your own company.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve been disappointed while at Duke. There’s nothing that lets you down faster than expectation, and whether it’s finding the wrong person attractive, the wrong answer for an exam or just the wrong end of social interactions in general, practically every expectation that I’ve ever held about myself has been questioned. Some disappointments sting more than others: one time I met a guy, as the story goes, and he was great: adventurous, funny and thoughtful. He was also graduating. It’s not an original story—separation from the people you care about at some point in life is both inevitable and natural. Still, I’ll never quite forget how I felt one summer afternoon where, sitting with my phone in one hand, I was hurt and angry in the way you only can be when you are suddenly aware of your own silly naivety.
Durham winter mornings are bitingly cold. I wonder if that’s why I gave the homeless man on Ninth Street some money. He looked up from the sidewalk as I walked down ninth street, just another big man bundled up in a bigger jacket. I couldn’t see much of his face, just a grizzled old beard and his eyes. A small glimpse of blue.
The man behind the Publix counter stares as I pack my groceries. What? I want to ask him, but I am not quite that plucky, so instead I rustle my bags and say nothing. He’s middle-aged with leathery skin and after a minute, he cracks.
People look so good in suits. There’s something about the crisp, clean lines of black blazers and laced ties that flatters everyone. Maybe it's the quiet confidence it seems to allow people to emit, the kind that comes with being done up nicely. I’ve passed a lot of suits and skirts and briefcases on campus recently, which is how you know internship season has arrived. Every time, I notice and admire. Every time, I feel a little worm of guilt.
On Thursday mornings, I find myself sitting on the plush blue sofa, waiting for my name to be called. There are a few of us here, waiting quietly. A tall, jock-ish-looking guy with blond hair looks out the window. A small girl in leggings scrolls on her iPhone. I don’t look at any of them, and they don’t look at me. It's a little awkward, but it's also nice not waiting alone.
One of the biggest fears I have is that I’m not going to be a writer. It has always been, to quote Morgan Freeman in "The Shawshank Redemption," my s***ty pipe dream—the one thing I’ve always wanted to try but never quite rustled up enough courage to do. Yours might be playing soft rock songs in front of a crowd of crying men, saving lives in the emergency room or reading people’s fortunes. Whatever it is, all s***ty pipe dreams have something in common—they’re not supposed to happen. They’re just supposed to be fodder for daydreams as you drive to work, preparing for the crippling institutionalization of a typical office day.
One of the most brilliant professors I’ve ever met once whispered something to me over lunch that I've never forgotten. “A person with no fear of disclosure,” he said, “has more power than anyone else in the world.” At the time, I could only nod slowly. We had been discussing the death of intellectual thought at colleges, and my own naivety and stupidity had never seemed so obvious. After all, this professor had two degrees from Harvard and a successful career in research. But he had also once told us he thought that professors were the most insecure and narrow-minded people he knew, and because he had been willing to admit this, I trusted him. I did not always understand him, but nevertheless I remembered his words. They had a ring of importance.
A few weeks ago on a Saturday night, I found myself throwing a tantrum outside Teasers, otherwise known as the local Durham strip club. This was not the original plan for the night—the chain of events that led to this is too long-winded to explain, but there were two main things. I was on a date, and I really, really did not want to go inside Teasers.
Sometimes when I need to relax, I like to take my tacky purple bicycle and go for a ride downtown. It is not a glamorous way to travel, and within minutes, the hills in Durham reduce me to a quivery, sweaty wreck, but even so I feel an immense lightness the moment I begin pedaling. Everything falls away and I forget that I am a Duke student with midterms to take and papers to write and responsibilities to uphold. It’s easy to forget since I have to focus on what’s ahead of me, if I don’t want to get run over by some sedan. And there’s nothing quite like flying down Chapel Drive, the breeze tangling my hair (er, the breeze underneath my helmet, safety first kids!), and watching the gorgeous gray stones blur on either side. I see the shapes of things and the colors, and I feel the breath raspy down my throat and the energy in my legs and for a few minutes, I am so intensely aware of the sensation of living. It’s quite glorious.
During fall break, I went to a concert in New York City and had, what you might call, a moment. I was standing at the back of a crowd, watching the stage lights flicker and dancing to the beat, when a feeling came over me. A kind of hyper-awareness of how uncertain and unknown the future was. A panicked realization of how little I knew about the rest of my life. And how every little decision could potentially change the trajectory of my life. I was dancing and the feeling grew stronger, and I thought, "Bella, you have no idea what you’re doing." It was actually terrifying.
Let me ask you a question. Are you happy right now? And if you’re not, why?
