There are many opportunities for Duke students to get involved with learning outside the classroom. This can be a powerful way to explore your intellectual interests, introduce you to research methods, and learn how to develop professional networks with faculty.
The Duke Career Center has curated interests inventories and self-assessments will help you to:
- Identify your interests: Interests run the range from a passing curiosity to something with consistent and lifelong appeal. Your interests can include your passions, hobbies, and curiosities. Your career can evolve to include the interests that you have not yet pursued as much as those to which you are already committed.
- Assess your personality: Your personality is unique to you and includes inherent traits as well as habits that you’ve acquired over time in realms like gathering information, making decisions, and relating to others. Better understanding characteristics of your personality can help you to articulate the circumstances under which you thrive, or natural strengths that you can utilize, regardless of your environment.
- Inventory your skills: Your skills are the abilities that you possess. Skills are developed and improved with practice and over time, though they can be influenced by a natural knack or unique talent. Communicating your skills in a way that builds confidence requires that you give evidence of your past exposure and success.
Check out the interests inventories and self-assessments below:
Resources to Enhance Your Academics
Undergraduate Research Support Office
The Undergraduate Research Support Office (URS) promotes undergraduate research at Duke through workshops, the annual Visible Thinking Symposium, funding independent research, assistantships and conferences and by providing support for summer research programs. Learn more about getting started in research below.
Muser
Muser provides a specially-designed, web-based software interface for researchers to post and students to apply for research projects at set times throughout the year using a clear and equitable platform. Muser has served nearly 1000 mentors across Duke. From 2020-2022, more than 20% of all Duke undergraduates and over 40% of first year students applied to Muser projects.
Duke’s Muser for Undergraduates program involves research mentors including Duke faculty, research team leaders, postdocs, graduate students, lab technicians, and research affiliates.
Global Education Office
Duke University is committed to providing an undergraduate education with a truly global perspective. All of us live in a world of increasingly interdependent nations and cultures, and you must be prepared to live and work in an international environment. While you can prepare in part through academic study and open debate at your home college, nothing can match direct experience.
Summer Experiences
Duke Summer Experiences seeks to aide the Duke community by:
- Aggregating all summer undergraduate opportunities in one place. The Duke Summer Experience database is easily searchable and directs users back to the individual program websites for more details.
- Innovating ways to streamline the application experience. Duke Summer Experience is testing a new centralized application system. The goal is to make it easier for students to apply to multiple opportunities reducing application fatigue.
- Creating a community of practice for program and opportunity administrators. Duke Summer Experiences seeks to build a community of practice where administrators can share best practices, resources, and lessons learned.
Bass Connections Program
Bass Connections is a university-wide academic program that supports collaborative, interdisciplinary research at Duke.
Through year-long research teams, intensive summer programs, semester-long courses and student research grants, faculty, graduate/professional students and undergraduates work together to explore big unanswered questions about major societal challenges drawing on perspectives and methods from multiple disciplines, as well as robust engagement with communities, stakeholders and decision-makers.
DukeEngage
DukeEngage’s central program is an eight-week, immersive summer experience for Duke undergraduates involving full-time volunteer work, community engagement, and daily reflection. We also offer the DukeEngage Gateway program, a scaled-down version of this experience for incoming first-year students, and the Brodhead and Decaminada Fellowships for students who have completed a summer of DukeEngage.
+Programs
The +Programs at Duke are immersive, experiential learning opportunities across a wide range of disciplines, including technology, climate, creative arts, applied ethics, documentary studies, math, and history. These co-curricular programs provide students with hands-on experiences that emphasize research, creative problem-solving, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Open to students from diverse backgrounds and varying levels of experience, the +Programs foster innovation, inclusivity, and critical thinking, preparing participants for impactful careers and further academic exploration.
Duke Immerse
Duke Immerse is a semester-long program in which undergraduates enroll in a cluster of four courses designed by Duke faculty around a central theme. Immerse themes take a deep dive into a significant global challenge focused with a multidisciplinary lens.
Service Learning
Duke Service-Learning is a signature program of Trinity College of Arts & Sciences. Service-learning and community-engaged (SLCE) courses deepen student learning by connecting academic curriculum to community engagement and providing opportunities to translate theory into lived experiences. Service-Learning is built on a foundation of collaborations between university students, faculty, and staff and their community partners. We support courses in a variety of academic disciplines, including sociology, education, world languages, documentary studies, music, dance, global health, and economics, among others. Through these courses and SLCE experiences, students have opportunities to engage effectively with communities on issues such as the environment, socioeconomic inequities, public policy, health, immigration, education, and more.
Our primary goal is to provide support and assistance to faculty members seeking to integrate service-learning and community engagement into their academic objectives. Learn more by contacting us for a consultation or visiting the links below.
Office of University Scholars & Fellows
The Office of University Scholars and Fellows, OUSF, empowers extraordinary students through participation in an intellectual community of peers, faculty, alumni, and staff that engages in scholarly and civic endeavors, preparing them to address the most pressing challenges of a changing world.
The office supports this mission in many ways, including awarding scholarship funding to students with immense potential, providing enrichment funding for extraordinary research and experiential projects, bringing distinguished guests to campus, and developing opportunities for faculty mentorship of students.
