Joshua Debner spends most of his time in classes. The schedule for the Carnegie Mellon first-year student includes calculus, intro to electrical engineering, and computer programming. As such, his days are spent answering questions of a mostly technical stripe, ones for which he’s going to receive grades. When he began the fall semester, he never expected his professors to be friends interested in his thoughts on life’s deeper meanings.

But on most Tuesdays, after the day’s course work is finished, the book bags plopped down in his New House dorm room, the mind shaken free of number strings and quiz percentages, Debner and a dozen other students on his floor meander over to their lounge, where Professor Kunal Ghosh, who teaches physics, awaits, often with pizza, always with a question.

Free food, as always, remains a big draw for first-years, but even without it, the sight of a professor sitting around a dorm lounge talking to undergraduates is novelty enough to bring in the curious. They sit, eat, and chitchat, but eventually the conversation focuses on the question of the day. One week it’s: What are the ethics of artificial intelligence? A couple weeks later, it’s: What is love?

Those doozies are courtesy of the university’s pilot program Big Questions. It’s an endeavor to make first-year students think about their civic, ethical, and moral development—not just their GPAs. Faculty volunteers lead regular group discussions centered on perhaps a book or a field trip, but always big questions of their choice.

Participation is purely optional. For Debner and the other classmates who took part throughout campus, the chance to sit down with a professor and some floormates, as equals, and to think about life from the broad side is both a luxury and a chance to shape a personal identity and value system in a way that’s more holistic and fundamental than a Java 101 quiz can ever be.

The program’s inaugural run ended with the fall semester, but the conversation didn’t. Debner, Ghosh, and a handful of other students enjoyed it so much that they’re continuing their chats through the rest of the year. And next fall, when a new crop of first-year students show up to poster their dorm rooms and get lost looking for Wean, the plan is for another professor to be in the residence hall lounge with boxes of pizza and some of life’s big questions to chew on.
—Bradley A. Porter (HS’08)