<p>I'm still considering attending Duke next year, but there are a few things which sort of concern me:</p>
<p>-Overwhelming workload. I'm afraid that between adjusting to college and whatnot, the workload at a school like Duke will swamp me and make me pull my hair out.</p>
<p>-Grades and GPA. I'm looking to go to law school, so a poor GPA would hurt my chances of admission.</p>
<p>-How strict is the core curriculum? How much space will I have to take classes that I want to take?</p>
<p>Finally,
-Is it really worth $30,000 per year? That's a HUGE burden on our family.</p>
<p>All are real legitimate concerns. I'll give my opinion on each after being here a year. Someone else's take might be completely different though.</p>
<p>-As much as the workload is a boost over high school, it is managable. What types of classes are you considering taking. Engineering seems to require the most time and studying and the hard sciences after that. That doesn't mean that engineers don't have free time. There is a lot of time in a day to do extra stuff or just hang out. Remember, for the most part, you'll be in class a lot less than your typical 7-2 5 day a week high school life. The typical student takes 4 classes of 150 minutes a week each semester (there's a lab or a recititation that adds to the amount sometimes). Duke work is doable.</p>
<p>-Again, I'm not going to lie--you have to work for good grades here. A's aren't given out, you have to earn them. It is possible to get a good GPA without living in the library, though. Just get yourself together early on and have some sort of routine and organize yourself. I don't know much about law schools, but apparently Duke has an excellent acceptance rate to them. I don't have any definite stats on this, but I'd say on a whole, Duke has a lower GPA than other good colleges that have less success with law schools. (I might be completely wrong with this, but it really does seem that way).</p>
<p>-The core cirriculum looks really sucky at first, but it's not that bad. Remember, you got 8 semesters to fill all those requirements, and many of them overlap. You do have room to take classes that you want just for the sake of taking them even if they don't help fill credits. Cirriculum 2000 isn't as tough to fill up as it would seem.</p>
<p>-Sending me to college is also a huge burden on my family. I think it's worth it though. It's kind of a surreal experience sometimes, with the basketball pride, the campus, the academics, the guests that Duke draws to come speak, it's just amazing at times here.</p>
<p>"I'd say on a whole, Duke has a lower GPA than other good colleges that have less success with law schools. (I might be completely wrong with this, but it really does seem that way)."</p>
<p>A few years ago there was a link going around to a study that showed how Berkeley's law school admissions adjusted applicants GPA according to where they went undergrad. It listed index scores for dozens of schools indicating how much extra "weight" an applicant was given depending on, I guess, their schools rep and grade inflation (or lack thereof). Anyway, the schools with the three highest scores (ie most added weight) were Swarthmore, Williams and Duke. </p>
<p>So I did some digging on this. And Boalt ended its grade-weighting practice in the late 1990s because that sort of strict numbers-based analysis favoring expensive privates is unfairly discriminatory.</p>
<p>The average GPA is around a 3.3, I believe, which is pretty high. However, nobody here feels like they aren't earning the grades they are getting and I don't think there's as much grade inflation here as there is at Stanford or Harvard or Brown.</p>
<p>my takes on curriculum 2000. it's actually really easy. after my second semester of sophomore year, i'll be pretty much finished with every graduation requirement outside of my major(s). the funny thing: i didn't even try. i picked classes i liked, and amazingly enough, the matrix of requirements filled itself out. granted, i need some math classes before i graduated, and it definitely seems that i am going to need to go out of my way to get those credits, but oh well... getting STS (science & technology) just happened out of nowhere, as did research. someone told me today that most people typically finish these requirements by junior year.</p>
<p>also-- you definitely work for your grades at duke. sometimes i look at some people and think they are consistently overwhelmed with work, and then they assure me that it's not as bad as it appears. i'm not one to get too stressed out too easily... i mean, it happens, but in most cases (as i've noticed) academic stress only comes in times where theres papers due in like... every class.</p>
<p>ask some past students of your school that went to Duke about the workload; they would probably be best able to relate to you.</p>
<p>the ones from my school say the workload is actually pretty easy, and they must be doing something right because we just got 7 admits, a big jump from 2 last year.</p>
<p>also from what I hear Duke pre-law advising is amazing. Its the 3rd highest feeder school to Yale Law which is #1. The other two are Yale and Harvard.</p>