Lilian Fan '26: Traveling to the Beat of a Different Drum
Lilian Fan was drawn to Duke not by rankings or undergraduate research or even basketball. She came because of a frequency.
Encouraged by her high school music teacher to explore colleges with student-run radio, Fan’s research kept circling back to WXDU. After an online deep dive into North Carolina, she liked what she found and applied to Duke two days before the deadline.
Like many first-year students, Fan arrived unsure of what she wanted to study, considering everything from environmental science to cultural anthropology to computer science. “I was pretty lost in terms of a major, and the pre-professional pressure to have everything mapped out really made it hard to find where I belonged,” she shares.
The static cleared at the Student Activities Fair. There, the first-year student met Duke senior Mina Jang, who managed both WXDU and Duke Coffeehouse, a student-driven music venue tucked behind Marketplace. Jang didn’t just answer questions about the radio station; she unknowingly introduced Fan to a community of like-minded people who would come to define her college experience. And it all started with a late-night detour.
Wandering East Campus one night, she remembered Jang’s Coffeehouse conversation. Veering behind Marketplace, Fan stumbled upon a brick building with lights spilling from the second floor. “I thought, ‘What is happening up there?’ and climbed the stairs to find a dance party like I’d never seen before,” Fan recalls. “People were spread out, dancing in these unexpected ways to music I’d never heard.”
Fan quickly became a regular at Coffeehouse, forming close friendships, including with students who also DJed at WXDU, where Fan now worked. Two Literature major friends encouraged her to try a class, which changed everything. “I took Weil, Beauvoir, Murdoch: Three Women Philosophers in Mid- Twentieth Century Europe taught by Toril Moi, and that’s when I found my major,” she says.
Fan added a minor in Computer Science, choosing curiosity over convention. It wasn’t always an easy decision, especially when explaining it to her parents. But over time, they understood that she had found something meaningful.
Outside the classroom, her center of gravity never shifted far from WXDU and the Coffeehouse. As DJ HedgeBug, she hosts a weekly show and has spent the past two years as the station’s music director. At the Coffeehouse, she books shows, runs sound and plugs into Durham’s local scene — sometimes stepping onto the stage herself, drumming for her band, little chair. What started as curiosity became infrastructure: a network of people and places that extended far beyond campus. “That community really grounds me and makes Durham feel like home,” she says.
Her senior thesis, “Resonant Histories: Space, Sound, and Everyday Life at WXDU and Coffeehouse,” stays on that same wavelength. Her archival project documents the intertwined histories of WXDU and the Coffeehouse through interviews with decades of DJs, musicians and organizers. Fan captures stories that might otherwise be lost to disruptions like the pandemic and the station’s relocation erased pieces of its physical and cultural memory. In piecing those histories together, she isn’t just documenting history; she’s mapping the frequency that first brought her here.
As graduation approaches, Fan resists the urge to pin down what comes next. She’s drawn to arts spaces, to community-building work, but, more than anything, she wants to stay open. Her advice to the incoming class leans less practical than existential.
“It’s okay to not know where you’ll be in 10 years,” she says. “The path doesn’t have to be linear. What matters is finding your people, the ones who inspire you, ground you and remind you it’s okay to follow a different beat.”