Choosing Duke for Graduate Study
Every once in a while it’s good to “toot your own horn.” Here at Duke, we have a lot to be proud of: Our faculty, students, and programs are among the finest in the world. For this edition of The GRIND, we decided to poll graduate faculty and students to find out what they considered to be the most positive aspects of their departments or programs.
Faculty
If you could tell a student three good things about your department, what would they be?
Robert Abraham
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Pharmacology and Cancer Biology
Our department has an outstanding group of faculty members with uniform commitments to the education and training of graduate students in cutting-edge areas of biomedical research. We have an extremely collegial atmosphere that promotes student-driven interactions between many of the laboratories in the department. Our outstanding seminar series provides ample opportunities for students to meet with internationally recognized speakers in from major academic centers, as well as small biotechnology and large pharmaceutical companies.
William Allard
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Mathematics
The mathematics department is very friendly and faculty are quite accessible. Our department has been aggressively improving itself and has succeeded in doing so for some time. Also, we have an unusually large number of highquality, well-funded interdisciplinary research programs.
Jim Bettman
Burlington Industries Professor, Fuqua School of Business
The program is extremely flexible, so that programs can be designed to fit the individual student’s needs. The faculty are strongly committed to working with the students, and the students are outstanding.
Blanche Capel
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Cell Biology
The cell biology department at Duke is a diverse department with interests in developmental biology, genetics, structural and molecular cell biology, and physiology. The faculty in this department is an interactive group with a commitment to the welfare of our students and an appreciation for their scientific and collegial contributions to our department. The cell is the basic unit of the organism. Our job is to under-stand how genes work to govern the organization, activities, and functions of cells. Training in cell biology is likely to be highly interdisciplinary and central to the study of biology in the next 10 years.
Garnett Kelsoe
Professor, Immunology
Perhaps the best things about the Program in Immunology are the scope of research is extraordinarily broad, ranging from molecular and cell biology to population genetics and applied mathematics; the program is rigorous and holds high standards but also understands and supports the significant needs of its trainees; and our graduate students have a strong sense of community and help one another during training, a bond that lasts as our graduates enter postdoctoral training and become professional academics.
Dona Chikaraishi
Professor, Neurobiology
We have great students who contribute to all aspects of the department, an academically superb faculty, and a a wonderful and supportive staff that make everyone’s job easier.
Romand Coles
Associate Professor, Political Science
We have a great graduate student to professor ratio (about 2 to1) and an ethos of contact and collaboration between students and faculty that is second to no other top ten department. We are committed to theoretical and methodological diversity, which means that students get educated in a wide variety of approaches to the study of politics, rather than a narrow training. Our department is ranked among the top eight departments in the country and has achieved excellence across each of the subfields of political science.
Helen Ladd
Professor, Public Policy Studies
Our faculty members are extremely good teachers and have national reputations for their research and direct involvement with policy issues in North Carolina, the country, and the world. Our strong core curriculum provides a solid foundation of analytical and professional skills along with opportunities for students to pursue their particular policy interests through electives in a wide range of policy areas. We also offer a congenial, welcoming and supportive environment within the Sanford Institute along with access to the vast resources of Duke University and other local universities.
Richard Lucic
Associate Professor of the Practice, Computer Science
We have world-renowned researchers on our faculty who are leading the exploration of some of the hottest topics in computer science. They put a lot of effort into individual attention and close student-faculty mentoring relationships. The Department is very fortunate to have excellent facilities and laboratories in which to conduct research, and graduate students actively participate in decision making such as faculty searches and graduate student recruiting.
Alberto Moreiras
Associate Professor, Literature Program
We focus on the critique of power through an analysis of race, class, and gender relations. We try to do this in reference to various and diverse cultural archives, including literature, but also philosophy, film, art, and so forth. As a consequence we are genuinely open to interdisciplinarity.
David C. Steinmetz
Amos Ragan Kearns Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Religion
Our program is a nationally ranked program (last ranked number four after Chicago, Harvard, and Princeton) with an excellent international reputation. It is a cutting-edge program for developing teaching skills supported with the aid of grants from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion and directed by a senior member of the Religion faculty, Professor Eric Meyers. We have a very sharp, nationally competitive but nevertheless mutually supportive, student body with a wonderful esprit.
Xueguang Zhou
Professor, Sociology
Our department has strong ties in mentorship and research between the faculty and the students, excellent resources to support students’ research and training needs, and great student interaction.
Students
What made you decide that Duke was the right place for you?
Sharon Brown, MALS
In the early grades, the important and valuable teachers were the ones who obviously cared about us, the students. In junior high it was the teachers who really knew and cared about their subjects that helped us catch the fire of their enthusiasm. By high school it was the active and involved teachers, who knew the wider world and helped expand our horizons to see new places in it, that caught our interest. The MALS program, and the Duke environment in general provides all of these things. We can have personal contact with knowledgeable professors who are valued for their expertise, enthusiasm, and involvement in the larger world. So many fine people from so many disciplines all willing to give their time, effort and intelligence to make this place (and consequently the world at large) a better place. The formal structure is impressive, of course, but once you meet the people and become involved in the place, it is the informal structure that makes the longer lasting difference between Duke and just any information resource.
Lezley McDougall, Religion
It was the real sense of community I felt when I visited. At the mixers and gatherings given by the Religion department, it was easy to see that the students in the department were not just there to show their faces. They obviously hung out together in “real life” and enjoyed each other’s company. Professor Liz Clark’s gathering was especially festive. Her gracious hospitality created a space where strangers felt embraced. My subsequent visit to Harvard left me with the impression that students there went to the university to work and went home to their own little worlds. Given that both universities have excellent resources and professors, I knew I’d be much happier living in a place where I could hope to also have excellent friends. The community and collegiality I felt on my visit has been proven to exist in fact, and has been a sanity-saver! I especially appreciate the above-and-beyond helpfulness of the students further along in the program, and the continuing hospitality of Professor Clark.
Linda Rupert History
Duke’s interdisciplinary “Ocean’s Connect” project definitely was a factor in my decision to come to Duke. I was frustrated when so many history graduate programs insisted that I declare myself from the start as a “North Americanist” or “South Americanist”. My subject area is 18th century Caribbean trade networks, which really can not be limited to one or the other. What a relief to find a university where my intuitive sense of the ocean as a unifying geographic space is embraced and encouraged. This perspective is also held by history professors who do not actively participate in the Ocean’s Connect project. Clearly Duke provides a general context which supports such thinking outside traditional geographic boundaries. I suspect that such a “thinking outside the boundaries” perspective also carries over into many other traditional fields and disciplines here at Duke; it certainly seems to be the engine behind the John Hope Franklin Center.
Rhazes Spell Biomedical Engineering
I chose Duke because of my interest in entrepreneurship. I felt that Duke offered a number of factors that would help me meet my professional goal of starting my own technology firm. First, the size of the school combined with the national ranking of the business, law, medical, and engineering programs provides a wealth of talented people with great ideas. Second, the proximity to Research Triangle Park provides an excellent outlet and resource for research ideas. Third, there is a lot of interesting multi-disciplinary work going on at the university that provides the interested student with an opportunity to do incredibly creative, non-traditional work.