October 30th, 2009 by Snapper Underwood
Article by Naureen Khan originally appeared in the November issue of Towerview Magazine:
You can tell a lot about a person’s worldview from their Facebook statuses. OK, maybe not a lot. But definitely something. Take, for example, what Ben Bergmann and Vikram Srinivasan—arguably the most visible political figures on campus as far as Duke students go—had to say on their respective pages the day it was announced President Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Bergmann, a junior and the president of Duke Democrats for two years running: “Ben will have a permanent quizzical expression for the day because of the Nobel Prize pick. But isn’t it great when the RNC, John Bolton, Hamas, and the Taliban can agree on something?” More »
October 19th, 2009 by Susan Kauffman
It’s an unusual claim to fame. Swathi Padmanabhan, a public policy major from Columbus, Ohio, has read every one of Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times columns since she was in the 10th grade. No wonder she was so excited to attend the fall lecture and booksigning at Duke of the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who often writes on global health, poverty, and gender issues in the Third World — and to attend a reception for him hosted by the Baldwin Scholars and WISER programs. Padmanabhan, a Baldwin Scholar herself, has dedicated her Duke research experience to getting a less expensive cervical cancer vaccine to Indian women.
Kristof didn’t disappoint. Here’s Padmanabhan’s take: More »
October 19th, 2009 by Snapper Underwood
Recently Business Week compiled a list of America’s brightest and youngest entrepreneurs, many of whom have made millions before the age of twenty-five. One highlighted young businessman was Duke alumnus Dylan Smith, T ‘07, an economics-major from Seattle with a penchant for taking calculated risks. Smith left the West Coast for Duke University expecting to be pre-med. By his sophomore year, however, Smith had changed his sights to business and had begun raking in winnings from online poker tournaments. At this point, Smith’s childhood friend Aaron Levie contacted him about an online venture in data storage solutions. With an investment of $11,000 of Smith’s poker winnings, the young Blue Devil and his buddy at USC founded Box.net, an online collaboration tool now used by more than 50,000 companies worldwide.
You can read more about Box.net and its CFO Dylan Smith in this Seattle Times article.
October 5th, 2009 by Snapper Underwood
Do you know how smart your neighbor is? If you live in NC’s Triangle then odds are that they are pretty intelligent, says the online publication The Daily Beast. This week the web magazine released a list of America’s most intelligent metropolitan areas; with a whopping Daily Beast IQ of 170, the populace of the Raleigh-Durham area topped the list. The Daily beast explains that the proximity of “two of the nation’s elite schools (Duke and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)” were major factors contributing to RDU’s first-place ranking, citing that the schools of the Triangles have “led to one of the nation’s great technology incubators.”
Of course, the intelligence of the denizens of Durham would not surprise any members of the Duke community—but we aren’t just smart; we’re cultured too, or at least well fed, says Bon Appetit Magazine, which selected the Durham-Chapel area as the “foodiest” small city in America. With all these accolades, there’s no wondering why US News ranked Durham number five in their listing of the top places to live.
September 16th, 2009 by Snapper Underwood
It’s an accepted fact around campus that Duke students can sell Duke best–whether it’s to the media or for admissions. Dan Piech, T ‘09, took his Duke-love one step further and created a Duke infomercial for his senior capstone project. After his final product was posted on YouTube, several Duke administrators came across the informative and edgy piece. Admins were so impressed that the piece was edited down to become Duke’s official thirty-second commercial spot.
You can read more about Dan’s transformation from student-filmmaker to university marketer in this Duke news article:
http://news.duke.edu/2009/09/tvspot.html
