By competitive, I DO NOT mean how hard it is to get in, or how good the school is. By competitive, I’m asking about the students. Are they collaborative with each other? Do people care more about their academics (gpa, internships, whatever) than about their friends? When I visited Duke I realized of how much school spirit there is, but I want to know more about how competitive each student is with each other, I don’t want to be in an environment were people prioritize their academics over their friends.
Prioritizing academics over friends doesn’t mean students are competitive with each other and vice versa. And I would hope your goal would be to prioritize academics over anything else for any college you matriculate at, far less Duke. The students at Duke are very smart and work very hard. However, relative to other top schools, they are more collaborative.
If you plan to be a science major or pre-med then you will find a higher than normal competitive environment. This goes for most colleges.
You’re basically asking if it’s a cut-throat environment (i.e. students do not want to help each other for fear of hurting themselves, messing up the curve, etc.). As an engineering student at Duke, I found that to absolutely NOT be the case. Students are extremely collaborative and helpful to each other – they WANT to help one another. There were many nights when I was in a group working on problem sets with others and we’d teach each other or give pointers. Same with studying for tests. In fact, I could easily argue I learned more from my peers at Duke than my instructors! There was never an ounce of thought that helping others would somehow hurt one’s own’s prospects. The only time one might not like it is if somebody is not contributing at all to the group’s conversation and just trying to “free load” – obviously, nobody likes that.
At some schools I have heard that students don’t want to help each other as much though because they don’t want the curve to impact them negatively (and, yes, there were some math/science courses at Duke that were curved to a B-/C+, so theoretically others doing better could move you down – but the impact was negligible and the benefit derived from working with others more than outweighed that as well as having a better and more positive experience).
So, I’d say Duke does pretty well in this regard, but certainly students push each other and you’ll find things “competitive” to become better but not “cut-throat” such that students don’t want to help each other.