This Tar Heel inhabited Krzyzewskiville

Ewa Zapala thought she was being invited to a tailgate when she got a text over winter break from a Duke friend asking if she wanted to “do tenting.”

Zapala was about to spend her spring semester at Duke University as part of the Robertson Scholars Leadership program’s Campus Switch experience.

But the sophomore, who hails from Radziszów, Poland, had no idea that “tenting” referred to the unorthodox way Duke students secure seats in Cameron Indoor Stadium for the Battle of the Blues.

“Sounds great!” Zapala texted her Duke friend.

She started to get the picture when she received follow-up messages with spreadsheets, informational links and a massive guidebook about life in Krzyzewskiville, the tent community Duke students live in during the winter to attend their home men’s basketball game against the Tar Heels.

“I didn’t want to say no to her because that sounded like a good place to build community at Duke,” Zapala said.

A Tar Heel partaking in a signature Duke tradition is an extreme example of the unique possibilities that exist for Roberston scholars, who study at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke while receiving a full-ride scholarship during their undergraduate careers.

Zapala didn’t make it to a game at the Dean E. Smith Center last season and spent this past fall studying abroad in South Africa with Honors Carolina. So Saturday’s rivalry matchup will be her first college basketball game. “Starting off with a big one,” she said.

To make it there, she took turns living with 11 friends in a tent from the third week of January through Feb. 28, when K-Ville closed. She helped construct the tent itself, braved the cold of winter (though tenting isn’t allowed in below-freezing temperatures) and survived randomized line checks.

How do her friends at Carolina feel about this? “They think that I went a little crazy with it,” Zapala said.

Junior Duke Robertson scholar Derrick Hamilton and Zapala, in the same tenting group, sitting on a bench near Krzyzewskiville. (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)

An aspiring doctor, Zapala moved to the U.S. at 17 and spent two years at an international high school in New Mexico.

Now a neuroscience major, she was drawn to UNC-Chapel Hill by North Carolina’s beauty and because she wanted to conduct psychosis research in the UNC School of Medicine’s Prevention through Risk Identification Management and Education research program.

She’s now working at PRIME as an undergraduate research assistant.

“Psychosis is a disease that progresses and develops fully to be diagnosable later during your life, so between your 20s and 30s,” said Zapala. “But when you’re slightly younger, you still have experienced some symptoms that will further lead to disease progression. Our goal is to find out what exactly are the symptoms.”

Zapala worked as an intern and education program designer at an adolescent psychology clinic in Tarboro, North Carolina, in summer 2025 through a Robertson program.

She’s also found a research home at Duke in the Hoyle Social Psychology Lab, where she is looking into the cognitive processes and decision-making of mountaineers.

After this semester, it’s back to Chapel Hill. At Carolina, Zapala has joined a debate club, is part of a premed club and runs with the Carolina marathon team.

She said she misses studying at Wilson and the Robert B. House Undergraduate libraries. The “community aspect” is what Zapala enjoys the most about being a Tar Heel.

“I think we have a very strong university culture that I’ve been gladly immersed in,” she said.

Zapala struggled to explain the university culture she embraced at Duke to her parents and sister in Poland. They find it hard to understand why she lived in a tent for a month-and-a-half to attend a college basketball game.

You don’t have to go across the Atlantic to find people puzzled by it.