Click here for an overview of the SKS House Course program.
Click here for a look at the SKS Spring Break 2000 trip.

"I am finally starting to ease up on the fear of not feeling enough, not feeling deeply and passionately enough. Now I am in the house course to challenge that fear to learn to look at myself and say what I see instead of telling myself what I am supposed to see. I wanted evidence of my life, now I just want a little bit of honesty about it."

--Anna Skorupa, Trinity '02

A Self Knowledge Symposium house course involves readings from diverse sources in psychology, spirituality, and fiction. Different works are compared and analyzed. Students might examine the spiritual messages of J.D. Salinger and T.S. Eliot, compare modern mystics such as Bernadette Roberts with their centuries-old counterparts such as St. Teresa of Avila, or analyze the Jungian symbolism in Moby Dick.

But that's just the tip of the iceburg.

The house course is an opportunity for a select group of students to re-examine their own lives. They reconsider their goals, they examine their choices. And they try to be a little more real—with each other, and with themselves—than normal academic life permits. For many students, it is an opportunity to be more real than they have ever been in their lives.

"I learned that SKS classes ruin me for the night—afterwards, homework and shallow chatter are not options. And I'm glad."
Meredith Warren, Trinity '02

"Aside from general raw information knowledge that I have gleaned from our meetings, I’ve also learned a lot about myself. I’ve begun to understand something beyond empiricism. I’ve learned that faith is more than a superstition and faith is worthwhile."
Tom Finley, Trinity '02

"I feel as if I'm being held accountable for my life; it's absolutely the most frightening and wonderful sensation that I've felt in a very long time."
Jim Ray, UNC '01

"SKS has been a wonderful mixture of me looking for my own path and others watching me through the forest."
Luke Bergmann, Trinity '02

"I finally realized it was fear which has kept me from going to SKS in the past, fear of facing these troubling questions I have in my mind. I need to face them."
Andy Baldwin, Trinity '99

"Action without study is fatal; study without action is futile." --Mary Beard