Campout

This weekend we had Campout, which is basically the graduate student equivalent of Krzyzewskiville. Students from all of Duke’s different grad school programs spend from Friday evening at 7 pm to Sunday at 7 am camping out in one location and checking in with the Campout authorities every time an air raid siren goes off.  If you make all of the check-ins (you get 1 “miss” or you’re disqualified) then you are entered into a lottery for the opportunity to buy season tickets to the men’s basketball team.  

 The first check-in on Friday

The whole weekend is a big party, and the business school is especially well-known for going all out.  Most teams from the business school (we split up into teams to share costs and tickets) decide to rent U-Hauls and campers for the weekend instead of getting tents and staying in tent-ville.  The nice thing about Campers is A) they have electricity for charging your phone, which is important for making sure people make all the check-ins B) the campers have non-public bathrooms (read: non port-a-potty bathrooms), which by Saturday night are REALLY nice to have.  Fuqua teams also usually get themed t-shirts.  My team decided we wanted full body costumes.  Sock Monkey Costumes.  Everybody else was EXTREMELY jealous, which is exactly the way we like things.

 Electricity = College Football Tailgating on Saturday

Coach K and the Men's Team showed up.  Coach K took questions from the audience, and I asked him if he thought Lebron should have taken his talents to South Beach.  Coach K deflected the question by saying he thought Lebron should do what was best for him, whatever that is, and then he said Kobe was still the best player in the NBA, followed by Lebron and then Durant/Wade.  Can't believe Coach K thinks Kobe is better the Lebron.  This exhange inspired many Kobe/Lebron debates later that evening.

This year, 1800 students entered campout and 1250 students completed Campout.  The administrators said this was one of the largest dropout rates in the recent history of Campout, because Campout was held unusually late this year and was uncommonly cold as a result (I think it was low 50s/high 40s). Out of the 1250 that successfully completed Campout, 750 were awarded tickets (aka 60%).  Hoewever, that 60% is a bit deceiving, because there are a couple of caveats:

1. “Double Dukies”, aka people who went to Duke for undergrad and grad school, receive a much higher probability of winning in the lottery (some say near 100% probability). 
2. Grad students who have completed Campout before and did not win are given a higher probability of winning. 
3. There are some other factors that influence the probabilities that I don’t know about.

Anyway, you can probably guess by now that I didn’t win.  Out of the 17 people on my team, 14 completed campout, and 6 won tickets.  Out of the 6, 2 were double Dukies.  So, the good news here is that the 6 winners are sharing their tickets with the 8 non-winners, and I’ll still get to go to some Duke Basketball games.  The bad news is that I probably won’t get to go to the top games like Duke vs. UNC.  Hopefully I have better luck next year.