Blog Competition: Duke’s Greatest Dilemma

I really don’t have time to be writing this right now. I’ve got two midterms, a paper, and a quiz that I need to be focusing on. Oh, and they take place in a span of 72 hours. But I’m somewhat thankful-it could be worse (sorry to my Duke friends who are reading this in an effort to procrastinate for their 15 exams and 7 papers and 2 problem sets and that pesky MCAT thing coming up). And because of all of this, I’m not going to double check this post. No time for review. Clearly, time (or rather a lack of it) is Duke’s greatest problem.

But Duke students are determined to succeed, regardless of how little time we have. We’ve streamlined every process of our lives to maximize the amount of time we can waste before we must absolutely start doing our work. We autonomously take notes in our classes. We automatically defer to Google Calendar to inform us of our next meeting. We intuitively know the shortest route between any two points on campus, and we can do it without looking up from our phones.

And therein lies the problem-we collectively spend so much time in autopilot. We all could benefit immensely from taking a few more moments to think about what we are doing and why we are doing it. We will never eliminate the constraints of time, but taking a few moments to think about what we’re about to do can make Duke a better place.