The Story

Fresh Voices, Timeless Questions—The Self Knowledge Symposium (SKS)

Some days, you're just a little more alive. More sensitive, awed, terrified, impassioned, and real. It happens to us all—adventure, risk, beauty, or magic. For a day, or two, or maybe a week.

Then what?

We forget. Either you forget there's something more, or you forget that it's available to you.

Welcome to the Self Knowledge Symposium—an active exercise in remembering.

It started back in 1989 at North Carolina State University (NCSU) when a group of students heard the life story of August "Augie" Turak, an entrepreneur with 25 years experience of intense spiritual seeking. Enthralled by the lecture, the students asked Augie what they could do to get the most out of college and out of life. Augie replied, "Start a group that centers on the most universal questions. Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose?" 12 years later the SKS has become a student organization on campus at Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) and NCSU. It has worked with thousands of students. From weekly meetings to sold-out lectures, from running a national spiritual magazine to spending spring break at Christian and Buddhist monasteries, from rock climbing to skydiving...the SKS is a group of students who will do anything they can to find the life most worth living.

Transforming Education—The EDUCATION as Transformation Project (EasT)

The question to be asked at the end of an educational step is not "What has the student learned?" but "What has the student become?"
        –President James Monroe

But just how far can students get with these questions without having a place to ask them? Enter EasT 1998. A small group of organizers from universities across the nation put together a plan for a conference with an intense mission—incorporating religious pluralism and spirituality into higher education. They aimed for a rather large crowd of 350 and had to order a tent because Wellesley College didn't have the space for 350 people to gather at one time. And the registrations started rolling in. When 550 people registered, they had to order a larger tent. At 750 they again had to call the tent company and upgrade. After just over 850 people had registered, the organizers had to cut off registration. The tent company had long since run out of large enough tents and the organizers were simply dumbfounded at how many people desperately wanted to be a part of this movement.

At that conference at Wellesley College in 1998, 850 progressive university faculty, staff, and students from across the nation came together to voice their concerns and take action that would begin to transform higher education into a place for students to figure out what kind of people they want to become and not just how much money they want to make.

EasT meets SKS

The success of the 1998 EasT conference led to another one in 2000. During the 2000 conference, the SKS participated as facilitators for student workshops. Both the '98 and 2000 conferences got rave reviews from places like National Public Radio (NPR) and The Boston Globe. Mutually impressed, the SKS and EasT came up with an audacious plan: let young people run the next conference. Who better to get a true perspective on what students are going through than students themselves? So together, they decided to devote this one entirely to students.

Students, here is your chance to let everyone know what questions keep YOU awake at night. And to let the university know what it can do to accommodate you on your search for the life most worth living.