<p>Hey thanks for the responses. </p>
<p>First of all, that post earlier in the year was not written by me, it was written by a classmate. I am currently taking a year off, and I applied to Duke because I wanted to know as soon as possible where I would be going to college. At the time, I had moved to Florida and was working on the Obama campaign full-time (90h/week), and I didn’t have a lot of time to give college admissions a lot of thought. Was this a mistake? Yes, but it happened. </p>
<p>This thread was brought on by my experiences at the AB Duke weekend, a scholarship that I found out yesterday I had won. Ironically, it’s a weekend designed to persuade those accepted into the very top schools to attend Duke instead on a full scholarship. My experience was that Duke was a very different place than I thought when I had visited previously and not necessarily one that I would want to attend.</p>
<p>Obviously, I can’t back out of ED for financial reasons, and I didn’t apply ED so I could get a leg up on the competition. I applied because I thought that Duke was where I wanted to end up, and I wanted to know that I could count on Duke as early as possible. I fully admit that this was a mistake.</p>
<p>I think my post might have been a knee-jerk reaction to certain things that I observed during the weekend, and my opinions of Duke have softened a little bit. I want to make it clear that I don’t care about prestige whatsoever, and I’m not trying to “trade up” so that I can go to the best school possible (which might even be Duke with AB). </p>
<p>As far as transfers go, I would hesitate to enroll and then transfer, because a lot of schools are incredibly difficult to transfer into. I don’t care so much about HYP because I would never want to go there anyway.</p>
<p>In response to another question, I would take a year off and continue working on the Internet startup that I helped found, which provides web tools to political campaigns (Clients include OFA, Martin for Senate, McAuliffe for Gov, non-profits, etc.). It would be difficult to turn down the AB scholarship, and in all likelihood, I’ll be at Duke next year. I’d like to reiterate that I’m not being motivated by gamesmanship, rather, by a desire to matriculate at a university where I feel I “belong.” Thanks again for your responses.</p>