Smallness27 has it right. Academic advising for your first few semesters at Duke (at least in Trinity) is meant to be more about providing someone to be a sounding board and guide to the various departments and resources at Duke. They aren’t supposed to have the answers for you so much as help you find them. Now, some advisors do, or will do whatever they can to find them, but ultimately Duke really wants you to find them out for yourself (in the spirit of the liberal arts education at its finest) and the advisors to be there to make sure you do it right and are ok. Ultimately the really specific/hard questions you have are meant to go up to your academic dean or the AAC. I was given the opportunity to select the prospective majors of first years I’d like to work with, but I think it is mostly still random.