Saket Vora

Sachi and I headed out to my apartment to finish moving out my things from the apartment. I met up with Pat Monigle, the friend whose room I stayed in this past semester. He told us about the great time he had at the University of Hawaii at Hilo and the adventures he had down there.

Today I got to see one of my best friends from high school - Keith Dowd. He will be in Raleigh this summer doing research for the Governor’s Commission on Crime. I haven’t seen him for over two years! We went to a Panera Bread and ended up spending three hours sitting outside talking and catching up with each other. Keith told us about his research in psychology and how things have been going at Appalachian State for him. It’s impressive - he’s already been published and will likely have another paper soon, has presented papers/projects at several conferences, spent some time abroad in Ghana, and is doing in-depth undergraduate research. I know very little about the study of psychology in general so I find it very interesting to hear about.

We also segued into other topics, such as the rise of religious fundamentalism and the dangers it has for this country and for the advancement of knowledge. Even though Keith and I come from different backgrounds, it was astonishing to see how closely aligned our beliefs have become. So many times it was like he was speaking words right out of my mouth. At one point, an elderly gentlemen walked over and I first thought he was going to ask us to be a little bit quieter (we were talking a bit loudly). But instead, he said that he couldn’t help but overhear our ‘vibrant dialogue’ as well as some of our comments about Christianity and wanted to tell us that not all Christians were like what we had portrayed. We explained that we were mainly criticizing the hardcore fundamentalist Christians and he even agreed that it gives Christianity a bad name. He went on to say how empowering his relationship with a merciful and loving God was and the importance of His influence in the world. He didn’t want to preach or anything, and I believe him. It was nice to see how people could respectfully over their opinion/perspective without being condescending, rude, or intrusive. We welcomed it.

After a while (and too much coffee), we headed over to NC State and I showed Keith the new engineering buildings on Centennial Campus before going over to Chris’s apartment, where we met up with Chris, Kalyan, and later Mike. We had a nice dinner at the Mellow Mushroom pizzeria (where Keith recounted a thrilling story of an being in the back of a taxi whose erratic behaving driver got chased and shot in the leg by an AK-47 wielding police officer late one night in Ghana), before heading home.

It was an immensely fulfilling day.