I googled how big dukes campus was and it was over 8,000 acres. This is way bigger than any of the school I visited like northwestern and syracuse whose campuses were under 1000. Could anybody comment on whether this stat is misleading or weather there is in fact a lot of dead space on campus???
Duke does have a large sprawling campus. There is East Campus, Central Campus, West Campus (which includes the Hospital and the rest of the medical complex and and areas like the law school and business). As a freshman you will live on East Campus and take buses to where most of your classes are for instance. There is “dead” space, there is the duke gardens, the reclamation pond, lots of open space around.
However large parts of the campus will be irrelevant to you as an undergrad, so the statistic is a little misleading.
Yes, it is misleading because 7,000 of those acres is the Duke Forest. And there is also a golf course.
http://newsoffice.duke.edu/all-about-duke/quick-facts-about-duke
So, as stated above, the campus is effectively 1500 acres, not 8500. Still huge, but not as large as the numbers suggest. It’s pretty easy to get to all the locations you need to get to on campus fairly quickly.