By the time Lauren Brown came to Duke, she had achieved success in the demanding world of professional ballet, devoting her childhood and teen years to perfecting her craft and spending a year with the Pennsylvania Ballet company between high school and college. After sacrificing "a normal childhood" for a life where ballet was everything, she embraced the array of academic and extracurricular choices that Duke offered.
The New York native immersed herself in physical activities like Bikram yoga, skiing, and basketball, which had been off limits because of the risk of injury or alteration to her ballet physique. She went skydiving at sunset, tented in K-ville, taught herself guitar, and took a drawing class. She joined the debate team and pledged Kappa Kappa Gamma. She forged close friendships with faculty members, several of whom became mentors. She became chief of campus involvement for the Duke University Partnership for Service, an umbrella group for student-led service organizations dedicated to social action. And she tutored engineering and science students in the Durham public schools.
Brown took a wide range of psychology courses with an eye toward medical school. But her innate curiosity led her to take additional courses in markets and management, software and Web development, and economics. The trajectory of her coursework and summer jobs led to an avid interest in advertising and marketing. She's been hired by Durham's McKinney advertising agency and is excited about combining her creativity and understanding of human behavior with the data-driven science of marketing.
"I remember hearing when I was applying to colleges that Duke was a place where people were always willing to help you get to where you wanted to go, and that's been my experience," says Brown. "It's a place where you can learn what you want to be rather than being pigeonholed."
Even as Brown is poised to launch herself professionally, she continues to supplement her lifelong bucket list. Seeing the pyramids in Egypt. Mastering Rhapsody in Blue on the piano. And turning a mountain of handcrafted, custom-made pointe shoes into a huge piece of art, a sculptural tribute to a goal now crossed off that list.