Undergraduate Education

Undergraduates bring the decision sciences into their Duke experience through coursework, scientific research, and participation in D-CIDES activities. Duke is notable for the sheer breadth of courses that involve aspects of decision making; these span all of the research themes within D-CIDES, from basic biology to societal impact. Students in Duke’s Trinity College can pursue decision-science-related coursework while pursuing any of the majors in the social sciences or several of the majors within the biological sciences. Students within Electrical and Biomedical Engineering majors in Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering also seek this coursework, if they want to apply computational modeling or biomedical techniques to problems in decision making. Students can also create their own major using Duke’s Program II option; this allows motivated students to aggregate courses from several majors toward a single coherent, interdisciplinary program of study. Finally, each year many students participate in joint research with D-CIDES faculty, often for academic credit through independent study courses.