Winter 2017 Issue

During the search for his first internship, sophomore Kevin Ma hit a dead end. He had started off by going to career fairs, but came home only with swag. He stalked LinkedIn and job sites. He finally found his way to the Duke Alumni Association’s website—and there his career course shifted. Ma logged into the new DAA alumni directory and began searching for alumni in his area. He messaged several dozen—and much to his surprise, nearly everyone messaged him back.

As I tried and failed and tried again to get the IV needle into the artificial arm, it occurred to me that this looks much easier on TV. No wonder nurses need training. The arm was one of the projects in development at the Pratt School of Engineering’s new Design Pod, a makerspace that’s home to an innovative new course for first-year engineering students. In the program, as I learned, student teams are challenged with using the engineering design process to solve problems for clients from the Duke community and the surrounding region.

ANIMALS

How would you characterize the trajectory of elite private higher education? In the fall of 1980, Duke’s chancellor, Ken Pye, wrote a report lamenting the prospects for these elite schools; Duke and its peers would have to scale back and “concentrate our resources on what we do best.” As smart and visionary as Pye was, he, along with just about everybody else, was completely wrong. From about 1980 on, it’s been a field day for the very top private institutions. A field day in what sense?

In his latest book, Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter (Harper), cowritten with Jeff Kreisler, Dan Ariely Ph.D. ’98, James B. Duke Professor of psychology and behavioral economics, turns his eye to the question of finances—providing insights into the behavioral psychology of what we happily pay for and what we refuse to. So we asked him: “What was your largest financial mistake?”

Epworth as antidoteI lived in Epworth my last two years at Duke [“There’s no place like Epworth”], which were, I suppose, the heyday of the SHARE years. I wasn’t (to my knowledge) a part of SHARE, but I was a part of Epworth.

It’s hardly surprising that a place like Duke, as a research university, engages with what’s conventionally called, in these parts, the “real world’—as if there’s something surreal or unreal about the campus world. But it’s worth noting that scholars at the Fuqua School have a record of studying the workings of the real world’s most valuable company. That, of course, is Apple. And its CEO, Tim Cook, happens to be a 1988 Fuqua graduate, an occasional speaker at the school, a current Duke trustee, and, as announced in January, Duke’s graduation speaker.

In an 1893 issue of the magazine Young Men’s Era, Trinity student Joseph S. Maytubby wrote an article titled “Opportunities Open to Educated Indian Young Men.” In it, he urges Native-American men to place a high value on education. “We see the advantages of an education,” he wrote, “no matter to what tribe or race he belongs who bears the brain in which the wisdom is stored.”

On a search for a piano for a friend in the 1980s, Tom Townsend ’80 ended up in a St. Louis warehouse of forgotten ones—uprights, spinets, and baby grands in rows that seemed to go on forever. At the time, the lifelong pianist lamented the thousands of instruments gathering dust. He went home wishing there were a way the pianos could come home, too.

To tell the story of Randy Jones ’92, you need to include two phone calls. The first came to his apartment at 1905 Erwin Road—walking distance from Uncle Harry’s General Store and the Central Campus pool—in the spring of 1991. The Dallas Cowboys wanted to chat about a possible tryout.

For twin brothers Zach and Mitch Finesilver, an added pressure influences each wrestling practice: the fear of losing a bout to a family member.But it doesn’t really arise when they face each other. No, it’s when they wrestle one of their younger twin brothers.“I don’t wanna say I take it too far,” says Mitch, laughing. “But I’ll just…maybe throw an extra hard crossface or club, so they know who big brother is.”

Gazing out at the titian leaves of Duke Forest, Professor Taylor Black and his aunt, Jean Black Carden, recline on her back porch and reminisce about their family’s five-decade connection to the university.Carden began as a secretary at Duke Regional Hospital Auxiliary in 1965 and worked her way up to director over her thirty-five-year career. She gave Black’s father, her little brother, a job running the snack bar at the hospital one summer. Black’s mom occasionally worked temporary jobs in the auxiliary. And Black’s grandmother worked at the hospital gift shop.

If you go canoeing through rapids, you’ve encountered standing waves—spots where the flow of water off various rocks and impediments creates diffraction patterns among the waves formed by the obstacles. A standing wave is a wave shape that stays in one place even though the water creating it continues to flow. If the standing wave is strong enough, it changes the direction of your canoe when you run up against it.

Here’s an economics joke: One day, it goes, a student asks the professor if he believes the adage that economics is the “dismal science.” “Well, if you think our science is dismal,” the professor replies, “you should hear our poetry.”

The fifteen or so first-year medical students, most in blue scrubs, sit around a conference room table in the Trent Semans Center. They are looking at their hands through little horizontal frames, little more than pieces of clear plastic.“These are called picture planes,” says artist Emma Skurnick, who passed them out along with grease pencils; the students have charcoal and erasers and other drawing supplies in little plastic bags. “This exercise compares the open-ended view of the world with the crystallized view.”