Reply to Duke University Admissions: Does having a strong interest in literary criticism help or hurt?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What 16/17yo has been interested "for years" in literary criticism?[/quote]
It's called "enjoying reading." Some teens aren't terminally online. [/quote]

I'm the PP who asked. I have one teenager who reads obsessively (no fiction, only a certain period of American history.) I've never heard of a teenager who has been passionate about literary criticism for years. Or an adult for that matter. And I'm an academic. So it sounded like a parental fantasy. Either way I doubt it makes a meaningful difference in an application to a school as competitive as Duke.[/quote]

I am an alum - a double major in history and Econ. I agree with the statement above. It is simply a difficult school to get into and a strategy of pursuing a niche interesting likely won’t be compelling. I might add that I obtained admission to the history honors program and it was incredibly rigorous. That experience changed my life and future endeavors very manageable. My suggestion is to be open to majors and interests. [/quote]

Is the history honors program just writing a senior thesis?  I can't imagine a school like Duke would have a whole separate department/classes for "honors" students.  [/quote]

Duke is a relatively small school. It didn’t have a separate department, but it had an honors director and its own requirements and one had to compete to get in the program. There were 10 of us.  To be clear, I was not particularly deserving but was a very competitive scholarship athlete and they did not have a serious candidate of this type before. I worked like crazy to catch up and did unexpectedly well. My thesis choice was limited because there were professors on leaves who would have supported other choices. My eventual choice was a European economic history piece. I might add the program exists today and the quality of the published work is outstanding and better than my work for certain. I found it similar to the thesis requirements at Princeton, where my daughter graduated, but she was not stuck like her father being a relatively mediocre dumb jock. I certainly was happy seeing the next generation be better! [/quote]

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