Office of Undergraduate Education

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…)

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.

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.

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

One day early in my Duke career, I was speaking to a family friend, Dr. Bret Fisher, T ‘82, Med ‘87. He asked me if I had taken a course with one of his favorite professors, Dr. Bonk. I smiled and let him know that I was enrolled in Dr. Bonk’s chemistry course for the following fall. There are many experiences that two Dukies, separated by some 25 years, would normally share: Convocation in the Chapel, studying in the Gardens, games in Cameron. But as I sat in Chemistry 83 and watched as Dr. Bonk perfectly fit Dr. Fisher’s description, I realized that sometimes even personalities can transcend decades. Now in his 50th year at Duke, Dr. Bonk is still shaping the lives of students. You can read more about Dr. Bonk’s impressive life at Duke and his great chemistry with students here in this Duke News feature:

http://news.duke.edu/2009/09/bonk.html

Three Augusts ago, Mike Posner found himself sitting in the Duke Chapel across from President Brodhead about to sign the Honor Code.   Last week Mike was sitting across from Sony/ATV music CEO Marty Bandier about to sign a record deal.   The savvy of Marty Bandier in catching Mike and Mike’s own journey are chronicled in a recent New York Times business piece.  Since matriculating,  Mike has formed a band “Mike Posner and the Brain Trust,” performed on Duke’s campus and beyond, and managed to be a full-time student.  Consequently, 2010 will be the year of his graduation and his album.

Check out the whole  NY Times piece here.

More than 1200 colleges and universities offer Army ROTC programs, but when the US Army wanted to highlight “a few good men (and women)”  for a recruitment video, they came to Duke.   This past Spring a small film crew invaded campus with the purpose of documenting the ROTC experience of Duke students such Pratt ‘04 alum Charles Bies.  From a French Science lab to the Von der Heyden, this digital brochure highlights some of both Duke’s and our nation’s finest:

http://www.goarmy.com/home/officership/index.jsp?iom=F693-OFFI-R1NA-07012009-08271-OFFICER#/?section=leadvideo&id=0

Originally in the Newsweek article, “In Search of Great Professors” by Dina Fine Maron:

Students are often surprised the first time they get an assignment back from Prof. Emma Rasiel—there may be a lot of red. Tough love is a tool for Rasiel, 44, a professor of economics at Duke University. “Students have been told for 15 or 16 years that they can get partial credit, but in the real world people don’t get partial credit,” she says of her grading practices. If you don’t have the right answer, you will get a zero. Though she’s strict in her grading, students flock to her class. “Anyone you talk to will recommend Professor Rasiel,” says Helin Gai, ‘09. “Her classes are a great mixture of theory and practice.” When it comes to the world of economics, Rasiel knows what she’s talking about: before getting her Ph.D. from Duke’s business school she was executive director of the London office of Goldman Sachs. In her classroom she merges the two worlds, often inviting eight to 10 guest lecturers to her Global Capital Markets class to highlight how economic theory shakes out in practice. She brings more Wall Streeters to campus to judge economic competitions she sets up for Dukies. Though she’s left Wall Street, Rasiel still keeps its long hours—mentoring students, running Sunday review sessions, and offering formal career advice through the school’s career center—sometimes totaling 90 hours a week. In 2001, when she was still a Ph.D. student, her Asset Pricing class boasted 30 students—now it has 130. While she attributes some of the uptick to an increased interest in the subject matter, her students say that she really makes the class. She’s involved with her students’ success right down to the little details; she even reminded James Melnick, ‘09, to tie his shoes as he was going into an interview. Later, he says, “I signed up for an independent study with her without even reading the course description.”

This article by Jim Rogalski originally appeared in DukeMed Alumni News:

Durham, NC — Johanna E. Bischof, T’05, MSIII, remembers well her first experience observing brain surgery: The open skull. The pulsing of the exposed brain. The blood.

“I got sick,” the irrepressible Duke medical student says with a laugh. “Well, not sick-sick, and I didn’t pass out, but I was very queasy and spent a lot of time leaning against the wall.”

Forgive her the un-doctorly decorum: She was just a Duke undergrad at the time and not fully confident that she wanted to become a physician. Observing in the operating room is a rarity in undergraduate education in the United States, and that day proved to be a powerful and defining moment for her.

“Seeing the brain moving in front of you is an incredible thing. I was awed by the experience,” she says.

Bischof is a former All American Blue Devil field hockey player and current rising star in the Duke University School of Medicine. She is the consummate example of the type of student—driven, high-achieving, and goal-oriented—that Duke neuro-oncologist Henry Friedman, MD, HS’81-’83, and Chief of Neurosurgery Allan Friedman, MD, HS’74-’80, (no relation) began targeting 10 years ago when they germinated the idea for a unique Duke mentoring program. (more…)

Duke’s international students come from many locales, some as remote as Tibet and others as nearby as Canada.  No matter where they hail from, almost every one of them is bound to find some American quirk or Duke tradition, whether large or insignificant, absolutely mind boggling. Over the years, these strange American and Duke ways become normal to all students alike.  I thought that Duke student Harsimarbir Singh captured this process perfectly in a recent NY Times column. Sure he’s a grad student, but his impressions sound a lot like what I’ve heard from my undergrad friends:

I was this young, turbaned Sikh guy heading to the U.S.A. with much enthusiasm for a top American university.

I got here in December. There was a lull on campus and no students except the spectacles-clad and tired-looking Ph.D.’s. As I stepped into the library, I saw a young couple in a liplock. Back home, intimacy in public is still taboo and is limited to Bollywood stars. I had seen white people kissing only on the silver screen, and now it was right in front of me. I knew I had entered a land of broadmindedness, kick-starting my evolution toward the Western way of life.

There were other alterations waiting in the wings. (more…)