Do you believe in the lie? What lie, you ask? The lie that if you go to a top tier school you are guaranteed greener pastures in the near future. Well, I believed that lie, and decided to come to Duke.

At first, I started off as a biomedical engineer with the intent of medicine. As soon as I found out I didn't like math, I decided to major in political science while still doing the pre-med thing. If my GPA ever bounces back from the engineering stint, I might make it to med school.

As the hopes for med school became bleaker and darker, I decided to come up with a better solution to my future academic plans. And so came the idea for a web company, which we started, called RhinoHazard. (Chek out our webpage at www.rhinohazard.com). Eventually, this will be the one stop solution for personalized e-commerce, but right now we are in our beta stage and looking for venture capitalists. Thus, since I have no future at this point, it is important to look at the academics.

Academics at Duke are rather interesting. Depending on your major, you can either cruise with a 4.0 GPA or suffer with a 3.1 (using easy courses to boost it over that 3.0 hill). People who focus in Medieval classical studies have a slightly easier time than those that do the pre-med route. By the way, pre-meds are annoying. Really annoying. I'm sure you've all had one in your classes. They aren't nerds; those people are acceptable. These people are annoying. They are the only person in an entire class that votes not to move a test back because they are ready for it. They are the ones who ask a question they already know an answer to just to look smart. They seek comfort in ensuring themselves that their test grade, despite being pathetic, is higher than other people's grades. Had I known that people (including myself) dislike pre-meds this much, I would have opted to major in Econ or something.

Aside from the premed spiel, there are lots of fun things to do at Duke. You can go to a basketball game. Actually that is the only thing to do at Duke, because frat parties get annoying after a while. It's like taking the top ten percent of the dorks in your high school class, throwing them into a giant bowl, which then becomes stratified into a new echelon of cool people and dorks. The funny thing is that since you started off with a weaker pool than your high school, you now have a dork society which thinks its cool. Hey, I am a dork - I am not trying to place myself above or below any of these people, I have just seen and I am writing down what I have seen.

Duke is in Durham, which is the middle of nowhere. Some people call nearby Raleigh a city, but that is a stretch. I'm originally from Ft. Lauderdale. That's a city. Everything here stops at 2 AM (North Carolina = Bible Belt = no alcohol past 2 = everything dies at 2:01 AM). I don't drink that much, but since other people that do go home after 2, there's nothing to do. Oh well. You can always watch cable TV.

Is there anything else? Well, financial aid sucks here. Somehow I bought into that 100% of need based financial aid people get assistance. I don't know how they determined that, because I know some people who are much better off than I am get financial aid. Maybe I filled out the forms wrong. At any rate, I am paying (read my parents are paying) 34k a year for the same education I could have gotten for free elsewhere. (I love state schools.)

Why am I here, then? I have been asking myself the same question. Hopefully a future employer will look at my application and see Duke on it, and that might mean something to him, which might mean more money for me. If not, I just bought into a lie which cost me over $130,000 over four years. I'll keep you up to date.



Recommended: Yes