<p>As an international who chose Duke over Chicago I want to assure you that you made the right decision. Duke is one of the best IB feeder schools in the country, furthermore the work hard play hard culture ensures that students develop in a holistic fashion and are eminently qualified to meet the challenges that life will invariably throw at them. Duke has consistently been ranked in the us news top 10, and will doubtless remain there for the forseeable future. Although rankings shouldn’t be your primary focus when choosing an institution, I understand that many internationals take them into consideration because they have no other way to gauge the quality of an institution. Chicago is surging in the rankings for the simple reason that it has begun to adopt yield protection strategies in order to enhance selectivity. I wouldn’t pay too much attention to their ascent in recent years. It is merely a phase. Interestingly enough, Duke has been ranked as high as 3, and is the only school apart from stanford to have displaced a member of HYP in the ranking tables. If you tabulate data from 1983 to 2010, Duke has been the most consistently ranked school in the top 10 apart from HYPSM. All the revealed preference studies demonstrate that a majority of cross admits choose to attend duke over chicago. Duke graduates earn the 7th highest salaries in the entire country (ahead of chicago) according to payscale.com. The reason I’m pointing all of this out is because I know how important it is for an international to feel as though he is getting an adequate return on his investment. Duke will definitely prove to be a great experience, trust me on this one. So, don’t regret having made the choice to attend Duke because it is the superior institution for attaining a well rounded education. You will find less pretentious pseudo intellectuals here than you will at Chicago, but there will be no dearth of legitimate intellectual discourse. Chicago caters to students that fit a particular mold, but Duke is a place that anyone can call home. Of course this is a generalization, but if you visit both schools you will find that it proves to be a rather accurate description of both student bodies. At the end of the day, the difference between a school that obtained 93</p>