NCSSM will hold its 2025 commencement ceremonies in Morganton on May 22 and in Durham on May 23. Here’s an introduction to the speakers at each ceremony, Dr. Rahul Sampath in Morganton, and Erin Locklear ’93 in Durham. 

Humanity in small town America

Morganton is a little different from where he grew up in India, says Dr. Rahul Sampath, Program Director of the Internal Medicine Residency, Chair of Infectious Diseases, and President of the Medical Staff at UNC Health Blue Ridge. His hometown – well, home city – of Bangalore has a population of over 14 million, while about 18,000 friendly souls call Morganton home.

“Life in rural America is 100 times better than a big city,” Sampath says. “I like the weather here, the air here, the sounds that you hear when you wake up in the morning. And I like the people here.” 

That fondness for people is what led Sampath into medicine. He grew up in a close-knit, multi-faith family that taught him to see the inherent value in all people. His family valued hard work, too. His mother was a successful entrepreneur in the male-dominated field of land development; his father a management consultant who graduated from one of the top universities in India.

Though from a dynamic and forward-thinking family, Sampath says no one pushed him in any particular direction, allowing him instead to find his own interests.

Still, it was his grandmother and the humanity in her work as a physician that became the “root” of Sampath’s own path toward medicine:

“She lived with us for a long time . . . and she had her own views about everything. I appreciated how she had the free spirit to develop her own worldview and to live a life the way she wanted to.”

Connecting with others has always come easily for Sampath, he says, but the challenge of getting into medical school in India was another matter. And it’s there where he sees a lot of similarities between himself and the students at NCSSM.

“In a country like India, there’s a lot of competition, and no matter how much you love what you’re doing, or how easy your studies may be for you, you really do have to put in some hard work to get anywhere.”

“It requires a lot of sacrifice, but what makes it worth it is knowing that you will be able to create your own reality if you put that effort into generating these abilities during the early part of your life. And if we’re lucky enough to have parents or others to support us in our dreams and encourage us, then I think we owe it to them to do a good job with it. There’s so many people who don’t have that. That’s the story of my life, and I would think that that’s the story of NCSSM as well.”

Part and parcel

Erin Locklear ’93 was raised on a plot of family land behind her grandmother Dollie’s house in a close-knit Lumbee Indian community just outside of Fairmont, North Carolina.

Where Locklear comes from is inextricably tied to who she is. There’s her tribe’s ancient history, of course, as people of the land well before any European ever set foot on the continent. But more immediately, there’s her individual experience of growing up surrounded by grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Even at school, faculty and staff – many of whom she knew from her community – felt more like family than authority figures tasked with overseeing her education.

Through it all ran a sense of belonging rooted in common experience. Like the marbles embedded in concrete at her grandmother’s house that spell out her grandmother’s name, Locklear’s sense of self is part and parcel of where she came from. “My identity,” she says, “is in that dirt.”

From the beginning, school was a special place to Locklear. Besides the intellectual stimulation it provided her – she loved reading, writing, math, and band, she says – it also provided her with access to friends. Where she lived, frogs singing in road-shoulder ditches were far more plentiful than nearby playmates; fields of broomstraw were her after-school playgrounds. 

“I just ate it up,” Locklear says of being in school. “I had really great teachers and administrators and staff who were invested in me, even when I was just a little girl. I knew they were on my side; I knew they wanted me to do well. And they just lit me up with curiosity.” 

Locklear’s path to NCSSM began when, as a ninth grader, she met Dr. Joan Barber, a now-retired long-time faculty member, administrator, and revered icon of the school, at a summer academic program where she was helping out. Dr. Barber told of all that was possible for Locklear at NCSSM. “Dr. Barber. . . kicked open a door for me and invited me in and changed the trajectory of my life.”

For the next two years, Locklear took all the math and science courses she could take back home, with an eye toward her NCSSM application. 

NCSSM was unlike anything Locklear had ever experienced. The classes and activities she had previously found only at summer camps hours away were now in classrooms and science labs a three-minute walk from where she slept at night. Gone were the days of having to find rides – if a ride could be found – over miles of bleached road to after-school extracurriculars. To participate in activities such as band or volleyball, now all Locklear had to do was stroll across campus. And the friends who were once miles away? Now friends were so close and constant that, even at 3 a.m. in her dorm, all Locklear had to do was call out in the darkness and someone would answer.

No one specific moment at NCSSM stands out more than any other in Locklear’s mind as representative of her time there. The whole experience, she says, is etched in her memory as a giant, collective feeling of joy. “I can tell you,” she says, “that I don’t know if anybody enjoyed it more.”

“It would be impossible to separate NCSSM from my life,” Locklear says. “I can’t even fathom it being any other way. It is part of me and I am part of it.”