Chauncey Nartey Suffern, New York Double Major: Political Science and Public Policy Minor: Economics
Chauncey Nartey's route to Durham was hardly conventional.
When he was a child, Nartey fled the violence in his native Liberia, first to Ghana where he lived for three years with his mother and siblings, then to New Jersey where he entered public schools as a kindergartener.
When his family moved to New York, he stayed behind and lived with his uncle in South Brunswick, N.J., in order to finish out his career as a top student and soccer player.
This background has helped make him able to adapt to different people and settings. "It is easy for me to be with different kinds of people. I was fortunate that I went to a very diverse high school. I'm a mixer," Nartey says. "What's exciting at Duke is that you get to meet different people,"
Nartey applauds university efforts to help students appreciate people of all backgrounds. "The diversity is real, but you have to seek it out. You can't just hang out with a monolithic group of friends and experience diversity."
One program working toward that goal is Common Ground, which Nartey says "is very good at helping you meet a lot of different people." Common Ground is a student-led diversity immersion retreat offered by the Center for Race Relations to promote respect for and understanding of others.
The political science and public policy double major and economics minor has thrived at Duke. He is a Reginaldo Howard Scholar, former president of his fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, the nation's first Greek-letter fraternity for African-American college students, and co-adviser to the Africana Mentoring Program. He studied abroad as a junior through the Duke in Geneva program.
Last spring he was named a student member of the Campus Culture Initiative Committee, a task force charged by President Richard Brodhead with recommending improvements to student life and campus culture.
But Nartey's personal focus in the fall of his senior year is "getting those law school applications out."
"I am interested in immigration law, maybe because even after 17 years living here I only now have my green card and am working toward citizenship.
"Being from Africa, I get family pressure to go into medicine or law, maybe corporate law. You get siloed," he says. "Whatever I do, I want to have an impact on people, not just on a bottom line."