<p>You’re mixing up intelligence and intellectualism. Duke just doesn’t have the prevalent intellectual (and maybe pretentious) culture that Columbia or Chicago may have. At top schools there will be a mix of students who are innately intelligent and those who’re simply ambitious. There is that stereotype of the “intelligent” personality, aka introverted and well-spoken and all of that, but someone could be absolutely brilliant and still like to kick back and have fun… and that’s still not mutually exclusive from even abstruse intellectualism. Not to say that everyone you’ll encounter at a top school is brilliant, but they all got in for a reason, and the motivation to achieve that you mentioned is probably a common denominator.</p>