<p>I'm a senior pretty sure about applying ED to Duke. I love Duke's curriculum and it's dedication to civic engagement, but there are a couple things holding me back.</p>
<p>1) I realized Duke is a sports oriented school (and that's great as I defn plan to participate in club sports such as skiing, etc.) but I couldn't find much evidence of a speech and debate team/MUN, etc. There's a nice amount of science research labs (yay), but I'm also into liberal, humanities type stuff. I looked on the Duke website, but had a hardtime finding anything. So do things like speech/debate have a decent presence at Duke?</p>
<p>2) I'm from a fairly large city in the Southwest that is always growing. Durham seems to be about the same size, but how is the citylife/nightlife there? Are there enough things to do in Durham? And internship opportunities?</p>
<p>3)Duke is on the east coast, but how connected is Durham to the other East Coast schools such as UPenn and Georgetown, etc. Is it easy/common to travel up to Philly, Boston or Washington DC (train, or flying)?</p>
<p>Thank you for any help you can give!</p>
<p>here’s my insight:</p>
<p>1- there’s definitely a debate team that gets to travel to really cool places and compete and whatnot. don’t be discouraged, and definitely go to the clubs and activities fair when you get to campus. you’ll find plenty of on campus opportunities to get involved with “liberal, humanities” type things that you may not be able to find when looking on the duke homepage.</p>
<p>2-after four years, i actually wound up really enjoying durham, and ventured off campus more and more as each year passed. i’ll be honest, my first semester i stayed on campus far more often than i ventured off. we wouldn’t grab dinner off campus very frequently, and would go to on campus parties more frequently than bars (this is also a testament to the way the social scene is set up during the first months of the school year). but there’s tons of great restaurants, fun bars and clubs, and other types of things to do at durham. it might take some exploring or a local friend to find everything at first (aside from like typical places – like shooters, or elmo’s, or cosmic, that it seems everyone always knows about), which is why people venture off campus more as the semesters progress. but you’ll find things to do. there are internship opportunities in durham, but in a lot of industries it’ll certainly be harder and maybe not as impressive as going to a bigger city/industry hub. but, duke career center has great internship placements for summers, which is when most students choose to intern. (many find the semesters are just too busy to take on an internship).</p>
<p>3- definitely easy/common to be able to travel along the east coast, especially for big break weekends like fall break (i visited friends at penn my freshman fall break and ran into a dozen duke classmates). there’s an amtrak station near campus, and rdu airport is also fairly close and services all the major cities, so it shouldn’t be too hard (or too expensive).</p>