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Sunday, June 4
Monday, June 5
10:30am-12pm—"The Zen of Writing: Writing as a Spiritual Discipline" part 1 facilitated by Georg Buehler
1:30pm—2:30pm—"Climbing Mt. Everest" presented by Anna Skorupa and Ed Cheely
2:30pm—3:30pm—"Spiritual Leadership: Understanding the Difference Between Your Job and Your Work" presented by Kavita Kapur and Mary Alice Scott
3:30pm-5:30pm—"The Zen of Writing: Writing as a Spiritual Discipline" part 2
9:30pm—Brainstorming session with students involved in different religious and spiritual groups on their campuses
Tuesday, June 6
10:00am-11:30am—"Passage" part 2
Georg Buehler is one of the founding members of the Self Knowledge Symposium, a national student organization for "real-life philosophy" with chapters at the University of North Carolina, Duke University, and North Carolina State University. Buehler has taught workshops and led discussion groups on spiritual topics for the last ten years. He is a professional writer and programmer in Raleigh. His writing credits include numerous published poems and co-authorship of the forthcoming book, Spirit of Generation X, an anthology of essays on the changing face of spiritual seeking in the millenium.
Anna Skorupa is a rising junior at Duke University majoring in English. She is editor-in-chief of the Self Knowledge Symposium's national student-run publication, The Symposium. She also serves on the Self Knowledge Symposium Foundation's advisory board and will be president of the Duke student SKS group next year.
Ed Cheely graduated from Duke in May of 2000 with a major in Economics and a minor in German. He got involved with the Duke Self Knowledge Symposium his freshman year, and he has been actively involved with the group ever since. This year he has served as Duke SKS President and as Publicity Manager of The Symposium magazine. He has also been a first-year resident advisor for the last two years, club golf president, a member of the Interfaith Dialogue Project at Duke University, and has worked with the Catholic Student Center at Duke.
Mary Alice Scott graduated from Duke University in 1999 with a degree in Women's Studies. She has worked with several youth organizations including EARTH (Environmental Activists Ready to Help), Youth Voice Radio, Break for a Change (a curriculum-based alternative spring break program), the Student-Employee Relations Coalition, and Empty the Shelters. She also spent 6 months living, studying, and working in Cuernavaca, Morelos and Tlamacazapa, Guerrero, Mexico with the Center for Global Education and Caminamos Juntos Para Salud y Desarollo (We Walk Together for Health and Development). She is currently the Director of the Self Knowledge Symposium Foundation.
Kavita Kapur graduated from North Carolina State University in May of 2000 with a degree in Communications, a concentration in Public Relations and a minor in Political Science. While at State, she served as the community service chair for EKTAA (the Indian Student Association), youth president of the Indian American Forum for Political Education, was a featured sports writer in the Technician (NC State's student-run newspaper), and served as chronicler of Alpha Zeta, a national honor and service fraternity focused on promoting the importance of agriculture. She also served as the president of the NC State chapter of the Self Knowledge Symposium and is the current Program Coordinator of the Self Knowledge Symposium Foundation.
Ken Felder is a long-time member of the Self Knowledge Symposium. After receiving degrees in Physics and English, he started a software company in his dining room, sold it to Microsoft, and worked for years as a manager in the Natural Language Processing group in Microsoft Research. Felder currently teaches high school math.
4:30-6pm—Student meeting to get to know each other
9:00pm—Optional student gathering
8:30am-10:30am—"Passage" part 1 presented by Tom Balistrieri
Passage utilizes mentoring, tempering projects, music, poetry, ceremony, discussion, storytelling, journaling and other techniques to assist young people in understanding what it means to be a man or a woman. It is a process that focuses on reconnecting young people to themselves, their family, their community, nature and the Creator.
Even if you don't aspire to be a great novelist or poet, the practice of writing can open you up to a whole new way of perceiving the world. Paradoxically, a ball-point pen to a three-ring spiral notebook can be the tools for discovering the ineffable.
The Mount Everest tragedy in 1996 has been splashed all over the news and book racks for the past several years. There are spiritual lessons to take from such a tragedy and from such an extreme experience. Reflections on the Everest disaster tend to focus on risk-taking, learning who you are and what you believe when the stakes are at their highest, selflessness, and sacrifice. A workshop centered around this tragic moment focuses discussion on spirituality with questions that ask the participants to apply what they are saying to their own lives.
It's tough to be a student leader in a spiritual group. Not only are you expected to be an efficient organizer, but you must also serve as a spiritual role model for your peers. In this workshop, Kavita Kapur and Mary Alice Scott share their own experiences in spiritual leadership and working with other students. Their workshop will be focused around helping students realize the importance of their job as a spiritual leader and its overlap with their own spiritual work as well as discussing issues around the separation between "work" and "job".
8:30am-10am—"Einstein, Bill Gates, and the Buddha" presented by Ken Felder
What should I do with my life? What is really going to happen after I die? How can I know anything for sure? Suppose you found one morning that these questions seemed profoundly personal—too important to answer with wishful thinking—important enough to seriously change your life. What would you do? Where could you look to find real answers, in your lifetime? In this witty, interactive lecture, filled with stories from his own life, Felder leads the audience members to find their own paths—based not on guesswork, but on their own common sense and experience.
Tom Balistrieri, Ed.D. is entering his fifth year as Director of Student Development and Counseling at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. He has served as the Director of Counseling at the University of Minnesota, Morris and New England College and held various positions at universities around the country including career counselor, sport psychologist, and professor of psychology. He also served seven years as a management development specialist for a large corporation in Florida.
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"You can do anything in this world you want to do if you want to do it badly enough—and you are willing to pay the price!"
--Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics |