North Carolina native Sidney Jordan has known about Duke for most of her life.
“I started coming here for soccer camps when I was six or seven years old and remember thinking the campus was such an amazing place that I just wanted to be here. But at that age, how much does a kid really understand about college?”
Years later, while tagging along on her older sister’s campus tour, Jordan’s perspective deepened. "Everything I saw, I liked. The academics are obviously challenging, and I wanted that, but I also loved the research opportunities — and Duke’s club soccer team was a definite draw,” says Jordan, who holds down the team’s center defense position.
Undecided when she arrived, she quickly landed on a Classical Language major. Required to take two years of Latin in middle school, the analytical side of the language always appealed to her, so much so that she continued with Latin until her junior year of high school. And after her first Latin class at Duke, she was hooked and declared the next spring.
“My first Latin class at Duke was when I really saw a different side of the language,” she explains. In high school, Latin was mostly textbook-based, but in college, she began reading original texts — what her high school teacher called “Latin in the wild.”
“Textbooks stick to the grammar rules, but real authors don’t always play by them. That’s when it gets more challenging and interesting. You need to account for rhetorical devices, style and context. It’s like adding another layer to the puzzle, plus the stories themselves are so fascinating.”
But her Chemistry minor and pre-med track took a little longer. “Although my dad is a physician and my sister was starting at med school at the same time I was starting at Duke, I needed a few courses under my belt before being certain medicine was where I wanted to be.”
Along with her career path, Chemistry has connected her with her mentor, Associate Professor Charlie T. Cox, whose research team she’s been a part of since taking his Chemistry 210 course. “I really responded to his teaching style because he works with us, so we understand how to solve problems. It isn’t just lectures.”
In 2023, she was part of a Bass Connections project that collected eye-tracking and visual cognition data to explore how people perceive and interact with ancient ruins in Italy. Currently, she’s working on a research paper with the Cox research team, focusing on the results of an innovative approach to lab teaching.
She explains that traditionally, a graduate student serves as the teaching assistant (TA) for labs. In this study, a graduate TA was paired with an undergraduate TA to co-supervise lab sections. The research involved recording student-TA interactions during lab sessions and examining the types of questions students asked each TA. “We wanted to know if there’s a noticeable knowledge gap between undergraduate and graduate TAs, the mentoring dynamics between the TAs themselves and how both interact with the supervising faculty member,” Jordan says.
While her work with Bass Connections and the Cox research team have been personally and academically fulfilling, her favorite memories go back to what first brought her to Duke: soccer.
"I think it's on my mind right now because we just had a game, but honestly, my favorite memories from college are the four years I spent playing club soccer. Last spring break, we traveled to Costa Rica to play local teams, explore the country and just bond as a team. Seeing each other at practice and games was one thing, but traveling together let us see a different side of each other, and it brought us closer. It was special.”
Current plans center around studying for finals and applying to medical schools with a hopeful matriculation in fall of 2026. Leaning toward either pediatrics or family medicine, she credits her ongoing work at the Family Medicine Clinic in Durham for her predilections. “Seeing the genuine relationships and rapport that the providers have nurtured with their patients has solidified it for me. I really like talking to people and providing that level of personal care.”
Taking a gap year, she’s excited to continue her work at the Family Medicine Clinic. And as she looks back at her four years at Duke, what advice does Jordan have for the incoming Class of 2029?
“While it may seem like you’ll have all the time in the world to try new things, trust me, those four years are going to go by in a blink of an eye. Be willing to experiment, approach things with an open mind, take a class you hadn’t planned on — have as many experiences as possible.”