<p>It’s not the most aesthetically pleasing building compared with everything around it. A little too much concrete and ugly tiles. I think that has a lot to do with it. Also the layout is kind of confusing at first. You never know where the stairs are going to get you (even if you’ve been here in a while - at least that’s the case for me). But it serves its purpose. It got food, mail, an atm, stores, and all the other stuff you’d expect in a student union.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Duke must improve housing. It’s dorms are not nearly up to par with the Ivies, Stanford, MIT et al. No A/C in North Carolina??? Are you kidding? </p></li>
<li><p>Duke must invest money to make Durham a fun town to live in. Right now, Duke loses a lot of cross battles with HYPSM in part because it is perceived that all there is to do at Duke is get drunk and ruin your liver at a frat house. Cultural options must be increased and advertised better. </p></li>
<li><p>Duke must make sure that the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill light rail system stops on Duke campus and connects the three colleges. Also, it should pull a Rice and pay for all student passes. </p></li>
<li><p>Why is the football team so bad? That should be changed if necessary.</p></li>
<li><p>Endowment enlargement campaign in order to be able to compete with top universities in the financial aid department. Right now Duke sucks and has a reputation as a southern whitebread aristocracy frat boy school as a result. </p></li>
<li><p>I think they need to implement a residential college system. I think all colleges should have that, personally.</p></li>
<li><p>They need to have freshmen fill out like a match.com personality profile/essay/etc and then match people for room mates that will be likely to be friends. Harvard does this and most people at Harvard end up being really good friends with their freshman roommates.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Actually Duke has addressed/is addressing a lot of the things that you’ve mentioned. Don’t have too much time now - I’ll go into detail tomorrow.</p>
<p>
I certainly didn’t find this to be true. We certainly beat Princeton and MIT by a long shot – and it’s not because we’re nice. We were pretty much identical to what I’ve seen at Penn and a maybe a little worse than Stanford.</p>
<p>
Does such a thing exist?</p>
<p>
It’s not necessary. Did you mean “if possible”?</p>
<p>
Yup, working on it.</p>
<p>
I’m actually glad we don’t have this; it affords us some extra flexibility when it comes time to choose where we live later on, if we can. Duke has been trying to do this, and that’s one of my less favorite things about Duke.</p>
<p>PS: Dr. G, has there been any discussion of adding ChemE? This would obviously be a major undertaking.</p>
<p>About the residential college system:</p>
<p>While discussing school spirit with a friend who goes to Yale, he mentioned how the residential college system hurts overall school spirit - that people tend to care more about their residential college (e.g. IM sports) than the school as a whole.</p>
<p>[About</a> the dorms…](<a href=“http://media.www.dukechronicle.com/media/storage/paper884/news/2007/04/05/Editorial/A.Bad.Week.For.Rlhs-2825569.shtml]About”>http://media.www.dukechronicle.com/media/storage/paper884/news/2007/04/05/Editorial/A.Bad.Week.For.Rlhs-2825569.shtml)
</p>
<p>As a person highly allergic to mold and assigned to the 5th floor of Edens 2A for next year (go figure), I was rather disturbed by that incident. I’m just glad they caught it now!</p>
<p>Freshman dorms are great, though.</p>
<p>In response to bluedevilmike</p>
<ol>
<li><p>I did mean “possible” not “necessary”. </p></li>
<li><p>The RDU light rail system will be in place by 2009. I read about it. </p></li>
<li><p>When does Duke plan to instate residential colleges?</p></li>
</ol>
<p>3.) Duke tried for a while to institute a “linking” system. It was wildly unpopular – for good reason, it was a horrible idea – and was eventually removed in favor of the more flexible general lottery.</p>
<p>BDM - we kinda sorta had ChemE for a while - not an actual degree but enough faculty members that people could get a concentration in it - but never achieved critical mass. I haven’t heard anything about sprouting a fifth department, though if someone were to want to study chemistry as well as an engineering, it is certainly possible to double with any of the departments we do have (easiest with BME; pretty easy with CEE-environmental; a little harder for MEMS and CEE-structural; and hopefully you have some AP credits with ECE 
)</p>
<p>why are there a ton of cats all over campus?</p>
<p>because hippos would take up too much space.</p>
<p>I like hippos… :(</p>
<p>Cats? CUUUUUUUTE!</p>
<p>Ditto Warbler’s #10. Also, use University Writing to teach writing instead of pc indoctrination.</p>
<p>
- The physics people feed them.
- Animal Control doesn’t pick up cats.
- They control the squirrel and rat populations.</p>
<p>FreshElephant - great question. I think the cats on West Campus are awesome. Now I’m not a cat person or anything, but they always cheer me up. They’re for the most part really friendly. You got the black furry K-ville cat (lets you pet it, likes to rub against your leg), you got the gray with black stripes Main West Quad cat (petted it yesterday night by the bus stop and it walked with me and my friend to the entrance of Kilgo I), you got the Bryan Center golden cat that seems to hang out around the back entrance of Armadillo Grill, you got the Physics Building cat (which seems to have gotten into some nuclear experiment in the basement of the physics building - or in a really big fight). There are a couple more that make cameo appearances around West. You see a few cat bowls around campus that students/faculty leave for them. Overall, they won’t mess with you if you ignore them. But yeah there is a cat population on West, and I think that they’re pretty cool and nice.</p>
<p>You forget the kittens from earlier this year! I think people kind of took them and brought them up to their rooms and whatnot, because they disappeared, but they were absolutely adorable.</p>
<p>West Campus quad cat=my favorite. I feel really bad having to shut her out of my dorm sometimes though, especially when its cold:(</p>