The men's basketball student ticket lottery deals a cruel hand of randomized justice, but it's not impossible to overcome.
I talked to three girls who were down on their luck from the start, but worked their way up in three different ways.
One thing they all had in common, though, was Facebook. Never doubt the power of Zuckerberg's first born.
Here's how to get a better ticket from the ticket masters themselves:
By being the better haggler
Dariane Davis started from the bottom. She didn’t get a ticket to the Duke game in the lottery at all.
A friend gave her a phase five ticket out of kindness, and from there, she started her attack.
Davis scoured the internet in a search to find what her peers wanted in exchange for tickets. She made a chart of all of the requests and traded up higher than her competition.
She called her feat an “all-day affair” — one that surely paid off when she got to go to the game with a phase one ticket.
By swooping in on Facebook
A phase four wasn’t good enough for Richa Patel.
She saw a guy post on the Class of 2016 Facebook page that he wanted to trade his phase five ticket for a phase four.
Another girl responded and said she would be willing to trade her phase two. Before the guy could respond, Patel’s roommate swooped in and to tag her in a comment in response to the girl with the phase two ticket.
Patel waited four days to hear back from the girl who was considering other offers, but her roommate’s swiftness paid off. She made it to phase two.
By giving it all you’ve got
All of Chisung Cho’s friends were going to have incredible seats at the Duke game. In her house of 10 girls, seven received phase one tickets and the other two got phase two.
Cho was stuck with a phase five. Needless to say, she was bummed.
She picked herself up and searched fervently until she found a loving sophomore friend who surrendered a phase three ticket. She kept the phase five just in case.
Cho was not satisfied, but she also wasn’t numb to her senior friends in the same boat. She gave her phase three ticket to one of them in exchange for a phase five, bringing her total to two lousy tickets.
She searched the Free and for Sale Facebook page trying to exchange two phase five tickets for a phase two. After talking to five people she just couldn’t strike a deal with, she finally found a couple willing to make the swap.
“At this point, I was satisfied but the fire in my belly still burned,” Cho said. “I somehow knew I had not reached Mordor.”
But she was losing hope. She posted a status to find a crowd of phase two people to sit with when her Gandalf arrived precisely when she needed to.
Her friend commented saying she had a friend looking for a phase two.
“This made up for all the joy that the bowels of Phillips Hall had sucked out of me,” she said.
Cho said she owes it all to her selfless friends, but there’s no denying her determination to make it happen.
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