Reprinted with permission. This article originally appeared in the Duke Chronicle on October 31, 2025.

Written by David Goh ’25

Visiting Duke as an alumnus is a real throwback — between nostalgic meals (including a coveted Marketplace swipe — thanks, freshmen!) I kept chuckling at the memory of my younger self drafting out my entire four years of courses before my first FDOC. From the clubs I’d promised to join in my Why Duke essays (only to find them long defunct on arrival) to the way I described Duke to skeptical Singaporean relatives as a “Methodist institution in America”, I was so sure that I could forecast and engineer my future college experience. Those were the days.

When everyone arrives bent on optimising their Duke experience, I now wonder: how do we try so hard and still fall so far? There’s something to be said for expecting detours — and letting others steady us when they come.

That notion would come as a surprise to the me of first year: who began college ready to optimise and maximise. I arrived with my three-year Math-and-Stats degree mapped out on a spreadsheet. By the first month, I’d appended a list of upperclassmen-endorsed “life-changing classes” I swore not to miss.

But four years will teach you that 80 percent of college happens outside any plan you make. In any given semester, maybe 20 percent of your time is spent in control: lectures you prepared for, assignments you anticipated, friends you see regularly. Then come the days your code throws inexplicable errors or you can’t get into a research lab — the sleepless, imposter-syndrome days that swallow you whole. Everyone knows that one innocuous task that cataclysmically overshoots the time you budgeted for it because you felt so close to getting it right that queueing for office hours just didn’t seem worth it.

By my final semester, my transcript was crammed with more courses than I needed to graduate, built on months of “I just need to finish this to get to what I want.” And I never touched that list of “life-changing” electives. So much for optimisation.

But the problem was not effort, nor the intractability of the liberal arts system. It was that we’re often blind to our own needs. Freshmen can pester seniors all they want for the best courses and hacks, but control is illusory. You’ll meet new friends, join new clubs and make tough calls you don’t yet have the perspective for. And when they don’t work out: you’ll crash out hard, having mistaken them for necessary steps toward your goals.

For most of us, admitting we need help is the hardest thing. Yet it’s exactly when we can’t help ourselves that others matter most.

In October 2024, I was hit with a spate of mental health issues and let two critical Computer Science 250D (Computer Architecture) assignments slip away. One day at lunch, I ran into Will Harris (T’26) and told him I was struggling. He was surprised — he was a TA for the course and knew I’d done well in the midterms. 

I vacillated, but he insisted that we sit together, talk through the work and map a plan to catch up. Most of all, he was there for me. Could Optimizer Freshman David have imagined that the redemption of my final semester from the abyss of the 80 percent would come from learning to accept help?

That moment made me wonder: if one conversation could turn things around for me, how many others might be waiting for such a chance encounter? What if the secret isn’t a grand mentorship program or perfectly timed office hours, but simply running into each other and checking in? 

Suppose every student occasionally reaches out to someone else, even at random, asking what they’ve been up to. Suddenly, the probability of being noticed during a crash-out period rises dramatically — a version of the bus-stop paradox, where random encounters often occur during the longest waits. Through these chance encounters, you reconnect with the very resources meant to help you. 

In a way, that’s the paradox: the more we try to optimize college, the more we overlook the human encounters that make it worthwhile. How much planning is right for you? My heuristic: as long as you go to bed happy, wake up happy and have a sense of direction, you’re optimising enough. In the meantime, never be too busy for people. Ping each other for a rose-bud-thorn; don’t be afraid to ask for help. And when you offer help, say what it’ll cost you — two hours, maybe — so they aren’t scared to accept. 

In the end, the real work of college isn’t about executing a plan flawlessly but about inhabiting the messy middle — the 80 percent no one prepares you for. It’s about being present, being available to others and letting them be present for you. That, after all, is what learning communities are for: the shared struggle, the reckoning, the part of college that truly sticks.

David Goh, Trinity ’25, was a mathematics major at Duke.