Three times a week, 80 students, sporting face masks and keeping dutiful six-foot distances from their peers, file into the Bryan Center’s Griffith Film Theater for an Economics 101 lecture.
It’s a tale as old as time: you enter a movie theater with the intention of escaping reality—at least for the duration of the film.
As a first-year student at Duke, I was often warned (with distaste and a strange gravity) of life on Central Campus.
Imagine a typical Wednesday night at Duke. As students filter out of classes and pack up to leave the library, they scroll through their phones—texting friends and catching up on missed GroupMe messages—to coordinate their plans for the night ahead.
On the last night of October, as darkness diffuses through the air and witches ascend into plumes of ominous clouds, we step into our costumes.
I’m having one of those weeks. Four midterms, classes as usual, club meetings, this column to write and the pressures of finding a summer internship looming annoyingly in the backdrop of all my thoughts.
As students at Duke University—encouraged to explore the multiple opinions that surround every issue, analyze a variety of approaches to a given problem and ask an abundance of questions—we often take freedom of speech for granted.
I would now like to pay it forward with a list of things I wish I’d known on that first, ominous day. P-Froshes, pay attention.
Sometimes life, in all its unpredictability, gets in the way, and we can’t transform our expectations into reality; sometimes we are forced to drop the reigns of control.
Rather than submitting to fear—accepting the nervous sweat that creeps down ducked heads as students in every state frequently huddle under desks and practice hiding from shooters—we must enact change.
