The D: What is the D?

The D is a special communications system the Office of Undergraduate Admissions has created for students who are interested in Duke University. It was designed in partnership with our Web site designers and developers to help students communicate with our office, keep track of the parts of their applications we’ve received and filed, and learn about Duke in a way that responds to their particular interests. To use the D, students simply have to log in and set up their account.

The D includes:

Message Center

We know you get a lot of e-mail from universities. As you might expect, we get quite a bit of e-mail from students who are thinking about applying to Duke. So, we created the Message Center as a way to communicate with you more directly. Messages you send to Admissions through the Message Center come directly to our office and can be viewed by the admission officer responsible for your region. And our responses come directly to your Message Center in-box, so you can view them all in one place—and you won’t have to worry about them being held up by spam filters.

We also use the Message Center so we can send you information that’s relevant to your interests, the area in which you live, your year in school, or your application status. And if you have questions for our office—things people commonly ask, such as how to join our mailing list, information about our SAT policy, what our admission requirements are—the D lets us automatically reply to your message with the information you're looking for. If our response doesn’t answer your question, you simply have to reply to our response and it will go directly to someone in our office who can give you the information you need. This system gives you the answers more quickly, and it saves our overworked staff hours of time, which they can devote to reading your application!

Application Checklist

Students who apply to Duke usually apply to several other top universities. Because each institution has its own set of deadlines and requirements, it can be a logistical nightmare to keep track of each part of every application and the date it’s due. Although we can't help you with your applications to other schools, we've tried to make it easy to apply to Duke and keep track of the parts of your application we’ve received and filed. We do this through your Application Checklist.

When you log in and set up your account in the D, you can set preferences for how you’re planning to apply: Early Decision or Regular Decision, Duke Application or Common Application, etc. Based on the preferences you set, the Application Checklist will provide you with an itemized list of application forms and due dates. When you submit an application form, you can mark it as sent on the Application Checklist. This way, you can keep up with the forms you’ve submitted and the forms that are still due. And when we've received and processed each part of your application, it will be reflected on your Application Checklist. (Please note that it can take us up to a few weeks to process each application form, especially during January. So don't worry if you mark an item as sent but it doesn't display as received right away.)

Personalization

There are many facets to the Duke experience, and we want to help you discover as much as we can. The main university site, www.duke.edu, can lead you to anything you'd like to know about Duke. And the Undergraduate Admissions site will explain the admissions process, some of the things that make the Duke community unique, and how you can plan a visit to campus to see Duke for yourself, among other things. But we also want to keep track of your particular interests and show you information that is most relevant to you.

You’ll be able to see your personalized information in two forms on the Admissions site.

First, most pages have a sidebar on the right side that contains short features on some of the people, places, and things that make Duke special. These sidebars are chosen based on their widespread interest (for example, we think everyone should hear the call of the red ruffed lemur), or on the interests you’ve indicated. It's our intention to keep that content fresh, but if you want to see a new set of sidebar features, just modify about me to add some interest areas.

Second, we want to give you easy access to the most current news about Duke. When you visit your home page you’ll see several subject areas that link to news stories about the university. Just click on any of these subjects to read the latest news on that particular topic.

Admitted Student Community

When you’ve been admitted to Duke, we will be as happy as you are. And you’ll have access to a part of our Web site that’s only for admitted students, where you can post photos and profiles, participate in discussions on our bulletin boards, and search for friends based on common interests. We’ll use the D to tell you how to access that part of our site when the time comes.