Seniors

The beginning of May marks the close of the academic year and accompanying commencement celebrations for our graduating seniors. The senior year is a time of enthusiasm and excitement, uncertainty and challenge, contemplation and reflection, and looking toward the future.

Data from the Duke Undergraduate Check-In study (DUCkI) indicate that seniors have high-quality, satisfying, and enduring relationships with peers. In the 2024–25 academic year, compared to students earlier in their Duke career, seniors more strongly agree that they’ve met other students at Duke with whom they really connect. Seniors also report having more “really good friends” at Duke (between 6 and 7 “really good friends,” on average), and a staggering 95.4% of senior DUCkI participants agreed that they had made “life-long friends” at Duke. Seniors also report being more satisfied with their closest friendship at Duke, and more strongly agree that they have people at Duke they can go to for important dimensions of social support, such as companionship, instrumental help, honest feedback, emotional support, and opportunities for self-disclosure.

These data are consistent with developmental theories about how future time perspective can shift motivation and goal pursuit. In the 1990s, psychologist Laura Carstensen proposed socioemotional selectivity theory, which posits that perceiving limited future time―either in general or in a specific context―leads people to prioritize emotionally meaningful experiences in the present over more future-oriented goals. Although originally developed to describe and predict motivation and behavior in the context of aging, socioemotional selectivity theory has been applied to the limited time horizon of impending college graduation as well. Previous research has found that, as they approach graduation (as compared to early in their undergraduate career), college undergraduates regulate attention and emotions toward positive stimuli, and report greater emotional involvement with close friends as compared to acquaintances. Relatedly, our DUCkI data paint a picture of seniors as viewing their peer relationships as especially emotionally meaningful and rewarding, as compared to students earlier in their academic careers.

Although we don’t have good data on the degree to which students view their relationships with faculty and other adults on campus as emotionally meaningful, we do see that seniors report having talked to more faculty members outside of class in the past month (approximately two faculty members, on average), and are more likely to say they have someone at Duke they consider to be a mentor (70.3%) than do students earlier in their Duke careers.

Together, findings underline the important role social relationships play in enriching the lives of students and infusing the learning environment with emotional meaning. Upcoming celebratory events that bring students, families, faculty, and staff together help honor these connections that students have made during their time at Duke.

Looking ahead to future years, research and theory suggest that connecting student learning and activities to emotionally meaningful goals is likely to be especially important in the senior year, as students approach graduation and future time horizons shrink (see here for a relevant classroom resource).