My Response to Unhappy Students at Duke: Reflections From a Duke'15 Graduate

Colleges and Universities A-Z Duke University
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Hi guys,

Its been a while since I’ve used this platform. The layout looks really different–a lot less Navy Blue.

I wanted to say that first and foremost, I’m doing very well right now. I have a lot of things going on for me and I am moving up in life.

Secondly, I’m inspired to write this because I’ve noticed a couple of Duke social life threads popping up and I was shocked at how I could relate to them. I wanted to take this space to explain how I too felt very badly about my time at Duke. My college years were far from partying and anything fun.

I should rewind and explain that I came from a relatively wealthy part of California, the Bay Area. Our culture is so different from the norm that it is very easy to get lost in our own world. I’m Asian. I grew up here and had never been to the East Coast. My dream school was Stanford, and I would absolutely not settle for Berkeley. I applied to a couple of East Coast schools just to see how things would turn out.

I got rejected from Stanford when time came. But I eventually had to make a choice between UC Berkeley and Duke while UCLA was a runner up. My ego wanted Stanford or something resembling it. So for that wrong reason I chose Duke. I remember visiting for orientation, and if I were to be true to myself, I didn’t like Duke’s vibe at all. But I chose it anyway to appease my ego.

This was the start of my negative experiences at Duke. I’ll list most of them in chronological order:

Freshman Year:

  • I didn’t understand the social hierarchy or the general student body. I had actually never seen so many white people who looked wealthy (are they?) congregate as my classmates. These people were tall and athletic which intimidated me. I was used to dealing with short and predominantly Asian people mostly from the middle-upper middle class. Even the popular kids in my High School liked anime.
  • I didn’t realize many of my classmates engaged in dirty rushing and made their moves to move with fraternities (read: Guys that control the social life at Duke). I was struggling to finish my Chemistry and EGR homework.
  • I didn’t know how to make friends. I came from a high school where being socially awkward was normal and accepted. I received a massive slap in the face when I got banned from attending a rush event at KappaSigma with my “friends” from my dorm because I wasn’t cool enough.
  • My friends eventually joined said fraternity and actively stopped hanging out with me. This was traumatic.

Sophomore Year:

  • Didn’t have any friends to hang out with. I tried making some, but we’d just be acquaintances. I was too needy even though I had good intentions.
  • Failed 2 classes.
  • Couldn’t rush and SLG Mirecourt and Maxwell had rejected me. Had a very bad experience with Wayne Manor.

Sophomore Summer:
Things started to look great here. This was the best time I had at Duke hands down

  • Started working out. Found a great workout buddy/mentor
  • Made some great friends
  • Got a campus programming job

I’ll fast forward to the end of Senior year and then make sense of all these events:

  • Still had trouble making friends as some graduated. My workout buddy got a girlfriend
  • Got laid off from the campus job
  • Developed an auto-immune disease called Ulcerative Colitis. It was very bad for me. I seriously thought of taking a gap semester.
  • No internship experience. ~2.8 GPA
  • Still a virgin
  • Losing hair on my head
  • Stayed in on Weekends because unless you were in Greek life, there’s nothing but Shooters going on. The sad effects of social suicide.

I never went to a single Cameron Crazy basket ball game because I didn’t care.

As you can tell I did not have the best experiences. At all. I remember being so angry at everything and blamed Duke for a lot of my problems. I had wished I had better counsellors or a better student body that was not so Greek. I hated Greek life so much because these guys had everything I didn’t from a community, to academics, to health, to the social stuff like dating and parties.
In short, the real truth is that I was the problem. I can’t explain why/how I fully internalize this today, but I’ve gained a significant amount of social and mental experiences since graduation. My experience at Duke slapped my face as a catalyst. I don’t wish my experiences on to anyone else, but I feel grateful to have experienced them. I’m much better prepared today at my job and life, and I’ve learned how the social game works so that I don’t miss opportunities as badly as I did at Duke.

Duke was not all bad and that includes the student body too. I’ve met so many smart and driven people here, and they’ve all inspired me. Things would’ve been great if I was more mature and prepared. I remember I had many opportunities that I squandered. I could’ve had a girlfriend in college too. There were plenty of women that showed interest. Even the ones from Kappa Kappa Gamma and other of those top sororities showed interest in me, but I just didn’t take action.

And I can’t fully blame myself too. At the end of the day, it is what it is. I feel I could’ve handled things better if I had gotten better perspective. Common ways to do this is to travel and read a lot of books. Standup comedy, public speaking, and putting yourself in such situations that encourage growth help tremendously. I honestly wish I took a year off before attending Duke and focussed on myself.

I guess I wrote this out to show that I had it very bad, but I survived and came out really successful. I’m working at a Fortune 500 company earning well over six figures and I’ve been with 6 different girls since graduation :wink: I don’t blame Duke at all for my college experience. It’s definitely not an easy journey, but I would definitely do it all over again, especially with my current knowledge.

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Your post is very useful. And thanks for your insights!

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So is it hard for asian guys to fit in at Duke?

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@StressedMew it doesn’t sound at all like "you are the problem’. To an international here, the things you say sound crazy af. How come being banned from a campus party is ok? Why do you say that “even” the girls from that sorority showed an interest in you? Are all the other girls lower quality humans? is there some caste system at a top college in a progressive west world country? And the fact that you developed some serious diseases at a young age certainly is not the norm.
otherwise, I’m happy that now you’re fine c:

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Hey guys thanks for the replies. My post was to show that a lot of bad things happened to me at Duke. It would’ve been very easy for me to blame it all on Duke. But that isn’t a smart way to approach things. Problems come and go anywhere you are. Opportunities don’t. My experience at Duke has prepared me for the real world. I just wished I was introduced to similar problems before attending the university. This way I would’ve taken the opportunity to take advantage of the social system at Duke. Take better advantage of my classes, and take advantage of the study abroad stuff which I completely missed.

I highly encourage prospective students to take time and mature a bit before heading straight first into Duke or similar colleges.

@imponderable : I’m not saying that it was ok to have been banned from a college party. It was just that I didn’t know how to conduct myself properly in such parties. After spending time going out for the last year or so, I understand social dynamics better and understand these things better.

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@imponderable - “How come being banned from a campus party is ok?”

The parties aren’t put on by the University, they are put on by private people/groups. They can “ban” anyone they like.

There is a great deal of social hierarchy at many US elite colleges. Harvard has their Final Clubs, Princeton has their Eating Clubs.

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“I’ve been with 6 different girls”

@StressedMew you should change your ID to RelaxedStud!

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@Benny365: Duke is like 30% Asian, so I’d say no…I personally may have had more Asian friends than white ones (white guy in engineering). Thanks for the honest post OP.

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Thanks for sharing your story. It sounds like you had a fairly sheltered high school life. Did any of your high school classmates have the same experience in college?

Going to college involves not only learning about academics, but also understanding large social dynamics. It sounds like you’re in a better situation now so good for you.

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@sgopal2 Hey thanks for the comment. I’d say that I did have a sheltered high school life, but mostly because I was obsessed with getting into a college like Stanford. So every thing I did was for that purpose. If Prom didn’t help me with that goal, then I didn’t go to Prom. As you can see, while I had something of a discipline, doing stuff like this early in high school was not a good idea because I didn’t have balance.

A lot of Asians I know were like this, but they didn’t suffer the way I did because they tend to stick to their own groups. I wanted something more. I was a sheltered Asian kid from nowhere who wanted to be a frat star in SNU/DSIG who was able to get all the grades and the social life he wanted. And at a place like Duke, you’ll find a ton of frat star, athletic, good looking people who will break curves on tests and get the ideal internship. Its absolutely competitive and if you’re not prepared properly, you will have a harder time with yourself.

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I’m impressed that you tried something out of your comfort zone and stuck with it.
It must have been so difficult, especially that first year away from home.
Was your high school mostly Asian?

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@dragonmom3 Hey. So my high school was mostly Asian, but its not really a race thing thats the issue here. I’d say its more of a socioeconomic issue. I went to a high school with mostly a lower-middle class presence. It was majority Asian (lower class Vietnamese and Filipino) and Latino. A couple cities away from ours, had more affluent Asian students whose parents were doctors and engineers usually Chinese, Koreans, and Indians, and some Whites while a couple cities further at Menlo Park and San Mateo there were more wealthy Whites. These cultures tend to do well at Duke as they have a strong niche presence if you’re into that.

Coming from my poorer neighborhood, I had a harder time adjusting to the new environment. I would just misread everything that was happening around me and that would just cause unnecessary mental stress. If I could go back in time, I’d tell myself to take a year off and spend it on travel or get a job and work locally to get out of the sheltered environment.

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Always good to take time and mature. I agree that a gap year can be a good idea for many high schoolers. College can be a tough place. Its good that you eventually learned how to deal with social dynamics.

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I don’t think that your problem had as much to do with Duke, or with being asian at Duke, as it did with you not actually being emotionally/socially ready for college. It’s a “sheltered/socially awkward” problem, I think.

I despised college for similar reasons to you, except that I was white (growing up in a definitely 95% white area) and went to a state school (which was mostly white, too).

I chose my school because I would essentially pay me to go there. As opposed to the Ivy League, which would not pay me to attend.

Granted, I don’t feel grateful for experiencing college. Mostly, because it was a complete and (nearly) absolute waste of my time. And I didn’t learn my lesson in college because I didn’t understand what I was supposed to learn, from an experiential/social standpoint.

This is one of he problems that I have with the entire college system, which is that if you are not emotionally/socially in a position to handle it, it will be an extremely unpleasant experience.

“I had actually never seen so many white people who looked wealthy (are they?) congregate as my classmates.”

The insano fun level of random wealth at Duke was actually the part of my Duke experience I found the most entertaining. Especially since I was there at the actual peak of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s. Granted, these were the wealthy white people from the West Coast.