#161. Undergrads (Saturday, August 3, 2013)

What was your best day…of being automatically included, even as an outsider?

One of the many ironic things about prestigious universities like Duke is that, on average, being an undergraduate there means a hell of a lot more than being a graduate student, or at least a Master’s student.

Being an undergraduate meant standing out among ambitious high school students whose lives were largely centered on getting into the best university possible. Being a Master’s student could mean you couldn’t find an attractive job—or, in my case, any job—with your Bachelor’s degree, so you dumped a truckload of cash into another credential hoping the famous name would open doors.

I exaggerate, of course, mostly by treating my own example as universal.¹ But I saw plenty of evidence for it. My hardest class was a fourth-year undergraduate real analysis course (#76); investment banks were more interested in rising juniors and seniors; and at the Wall Street Five Rings trading competition (#79) three weeks later, everybody else had already interned at another finance firm.

That inadequacy felt worse during my largely unproductive summer in Durham: no job, no classes, just part-time research work for two professors, while several classmates were away on internships and my social world had compressed.

But Edward Hao (#76), my fellow Ottawa native, rising neuroscience senior, and genuinely nice guy, was around doing research work that summer. And so we hung out a few times—dinner at my place, pizza at his, Pacific Rim with a couple of his friends, and the much less awesome Wolverine with another group.

On this Saturday, they’ve got a bigger event planned. Edward, a pre-med guy named Scott,² and another guy whose name I don’t remember pick me up to shop for ingredients at a giant Chinese supermarket before a massive cookout that night.

Inexplicably, most of the details are blurry. I don’t remember exactly who joined us or what we cooked, except that there were several difficult dishes and I contributed almost nothing. My one meaningful job was crushing bags of peanuts for a sauce by endlessly grinding them against the foot of a chair—a task I apparently performed amazingly well.

After eating ourselves nearly immobile, we played board games that I also somehow can’t remember—blasphemy for a board-game nerd like me.

What I do remember is how unexpectedly friendly Edward’s friends were. They treated me—this socially awkward outsider two years removed from their cohort—as one of them almost immediately, even showing genuine interest in the graduate-student life I had spent much of the year viewing as inferior to theirs. (In hindsight, my impression of Duke undergrads as aloof and socially aggressive had probably been skewed by mostly encountering them in high-stakes classes and investment banking events.)

By the success metrics I cared about at the time, I still saw most of these students, including Edward, as ahead of me. But for one night, that hierarchy—real or imagined—didn’t matter. I was simply one of them.

Obviously, getting into and completing a good Master’s program requires plenty of skill and opened doors for me that otherwise wouldn’t have existed. But clearly I’m making a point here.
I remember Scott mainly because he was explaining some intense cancer-cell research when I got into the car, and because that fall I somehow intercepted his flag football (#27) team twice.