Office of Undergraduate Education

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…)

Duke this spring hosted 400 high schoolers for four days of intense debate and diplomacy surrounding a mock international crisis — the drug cartel problem in Latin America. The students gave the Model UN conference rave reviews. They even created a Facebook fan page for the secretary general – Duke student Jin-Soo Huh. Here Jin-Soo shares secrets for a highly successful conference and how the Duke International Relations Association added to his Duke experience:

The MUN conference has been around for a long time (it was our 28th conference this year), but when I first joined the Duke International Relations Association (DIRA) in 2005, the conference was kind of thrown together. Many students from my year actually left DIRA, which is composed of students from all sorts of majors – those studying international politics and pre-meds interested in global health, to engineers involved in groups like Engineers without Borders.  Many, like me, had hoped to find a strong MUN program at Duke through which to continue the work they’d enjoyed in high school. The next two years saw a marked improvement in the conference and we were a good conference. This year, we moved from being just a regional conference attracting North Carolina schools to one that has a national reputation. (more…)

Space is a funny thing.  We know it as a concept. We can measure it and give it a formula, but it never seems to be real until it is in our faces—and more typically than not, until there is a perceived shortage or surfeit of it.  Think football stadium or  small closet!    A group of intrepid Duke students, however, have been trying this past semester to circumvent the disconnect between represented space and the understanding one gets from being in that space.  The members of “Wired: New Representation Technologies for Historical Materials” spent this spring digitally recreating the second-century Roman baths in Aphrodisias (modern Turkey) by re-placing statues and artifacts (now scattered across the world in museums) into a virtual space made from the ruins. (more…)

Click here to watch a trailer and vote on the movie!

The other day I was forwarded an e-mail from Christina Pogoloff, an instructor in the Writing Program, praising the work of her former student.  The student, Gwendolyn Oxenham( T’04) has been filming a documentary, called Footplay, on impromptu soccer matches around the globe.  The documentary is now in a competition with nine other films.  Check Footplay and vote–she needs 10,000 votes, so hurry!  Also check out Duke Magazine on her work below:

Gwendolyn Oxenham and Luke Boughen have played pickup soccer with inmates in the San Pedro Prison in La Paz, Bolivia.They’ve suited up against Iraqi expats in London, run with teenage soccer nuts in Marseilles, and competed in an Arab-versus-Israeli game in a park outside Jerusalem’s Old City.

Both former varsity soccer players—Oxenham at Duke, and Boughen at Notre Dame—they’ve spent much of the last year traveling the world in search of a good game, and capturing it all on film for a documentary-in-the-works tentatively titled The Soccer Project. (more…)

What are you doing this summer? This question is usually a conversation pleasantry. But when Caroline Bruzelius, the Anne. M. Cogan Professor of Medieval Art, asks you “What are you doing this summer?” she means it–I know first hand. A few months after she asked me, I was boarding a plane for Venice. This year a few more lucky undergraduates received that query and a university-sponsored trip to Italy. Whereas I was sketching churches around Venezia, this motley crew of Classicists and Art Historians are plotting digitally the urban layout of Naples, from ancient Neapolis to modern Napoli.

You can follow their adventures from pizza to Franciscan Monks, on their blog:

http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/olson/courses/wired/

Related Stories:

Duke Students Digitally Model Roman Baths

Senior Creates Virtual, 3-D Cathedral

Picture this: six girls who don’t know each other living together in an apartment in a country foreign to all of them – and they only have one hair drier among them. If that doesn’t scream “recipe for disaster” to you, you may well be the bravest soul on this planet. Six girls with beautiful, long hair, who all have to leave for work between eight and nine in the morning, sharing one hair drier?

I was among one of those six girls who traveled from Duke to Dublin, Ireland for two months last summer, and I needed that hair drier just like the rest of them. But I can’t think of a single instance when I was rushed to dry my wavy locks faster than you can say “bad hair day,” or when I had to fight someone using my yellow-belt karate skills from fifth grade to steal the gadget away. There were no verbal or physical attacks between us girls during our two months there – regarding hair dryers or anything else, for that matter. (more…)

Each year Duke students travel thousands of miles and spend countless hours in order to get home for a Thanksgiving meal.  For many international students, though, the time and cost of getting home is too high for a long weekend.  This year the Office of Undergraduate Education treated some international students to a Thanksgiving meal away from campus at George’s Garage, an upscale eatery within walking distance of East. (more…)