Dean Gillis Welcomes Students
Summer is ending on the hilltop and as students prepare to board planes, trains and automobiles to come home to Georgetown, some eagerly anticipate the end of their college careers, while others celebrate the beginning. This is the time of year when I send a special welcome to our seniors, the class of 2010, and our first years, the class of 2013. 
For new freshmen and transfers students the campus tours are done. The applications are done. Checking the mailbox (or e-mail) for the acceptance letter is done. You are here, and you are officially a Hoya. Congratulations! We are delighted to welcome you to Georgetown College. As you get settled, the trips to Bed, Bath, and Beyond may still not be done, but consider yourselves home, a home we believe you will find to be exciting, challenging, and friendly. Since the day you were admitted, we have been waiting for you and preparing for you. You are the reason that we are here. A university is, first and foremost, its students and its faculty, and we have an exceptional group of both.
As you look around, most people are strangers to you. But take a closer look. In the weeks, months, and years to come, in this group you will find friends, roommates, fellow scholars, teammates, and soul mates. In your classrooms you will encounter faculty whose passion is teaching and exploring new horizons of knowledge. You will share late-night study sessions with people as smart as, and sometimes smarter than, you. In the offices of Georgetown College you will meet with deans who know your record and who are anxious to get to know you. You will map out a course of study that challenges you, deepens your expertise in a discipline (or perhaps several disciplines), stretches your provincial interests, exposes you to areas of inquiry previously unexplored, and prepares you for life after college—and I do mean life—not simply a job, or graduate or professional school, though surely you will be able to obtain those with your Georgetown education. But what is even more important, you will be shaped intellectually, personally, and spiritually. And this will not happen by accident but by our design and your participation. We are aware, however, that no two of you are alike. You are the one and only original “you.” While you will be changed by your experiences here, we want to reassure you that you won’t be changed beyond recognition. You will be the same old “you” that your family and friends have always known and loved.
Here, you will encounter fascinating figures, some of whom have been at Georgetown College since our founding in 1789—Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, Martin Luther, Newton, Kepler, de Tocqueville, Hobbes, Locke, Mozart, and others who have joined us along the way—Darwin, Max Planck, Einstein (even if he did teach at Princeton), Wordsworth, Coleridge, Ibsen, Monét, Chagall, Philip Glass, Martin Luther King Jr., Keynes, Elie Wiesel, and Noam Chomsky. We are still reading their works, viewing their paintings, listening to their compositions, and learning from them. Now, you will join your voices in the conversation about ideas, because ideas are the coin of the realm in a university. You will be critically introduced to ideas sustained through history and you will be asked—no required—to think critically and to generate your own ideas about history, and language, and philosophy, and theology, and literature, and government, and all of the disciplines that a robust liberal arts curriculum provides.
We know that you have worked hard to get here. We hope that you feel as we do: that you have caught the brass ring on the merry-go-round of college admissions. And that you have chosen the crown jewel of Georgetown University—the College, home to the largest number of students, the largest number of faculty, and the largest array of majors and minors. And most important, home to the class of 2013. Welcome.
For our seniors, and for their parents, this is that much anticipated last leg of a great journey. Welcome home! And some advice, work hard and get the most that you can out of your final year at Georgetown.
For our first year students, and for their parents, welcome to some of the most intellectually formative years of your life. Right now, as you begin your first year at Georgetown, this moment may feel like the culmination of many years of hard work. You have all dedicated yourself to your studies in high school and you have earned the right to be here, at Georgetown, among some of the best and brightest students in the world. You may feel that getting here was the goal and that being here will set you up for the life you had always envisioned for yourself, whatever that may be.
Let me be the first to remind you that this is really the beginning of your journey to become the adult that you were meant to be. You may think that you are all grown up, and that you know exactly what you want to do with your life, and you may be right. But leave open the possibility that you may change your mind. Let your first year at Georgetown be an intellectual journey into the wide world of what you don’t know. Let yourself think deeply, and question purposefully, and maybe even change. The purpose of a liberal arts education is not to train you, but to help you to develop the intellectual tools and moral compass that will make you a better version of yourself.
Welcome home to Georgetown.
Chester Gillis
Dean
Georgetown College
