Thirty years ago this week I arrived at Georgetown as a freshman and moved onto Fourth Darnall. Twenty years ago this week I professed my first vows as a Jesuit. Looking back, I now see that those two events were not unrelated. Georgetown helped shape my life’s path by teaching me the habit of asking the big questions about life in general, and my life in particular, and by teaching me the rudimentary skills I needed to begin my search for the answers to those questions.

It can be hard to boil down what sorts of habits of mind and heart Georgetown hopes to pass on to her undergraduate students. Catholic endeavors as big as universities have never really lent themselves to sound bytes because they bring with them a back story and shared imagination that have been two millennia in the making. Those rich resources of our tradition have come to rely on things like art, music, theater, architecture, liturgy and literature to express themselves with something that only approaches fullness after a lifetime of participation, percolation and practice.

Wrapping your mind and heart around Georgetown will take time. Still, the beginning of a school year (and an undergraduate career) is a good time to ask ourselves what we’re doing here and why we’re doing it.

I was pondering those sorts of basic questions last week as I prepared for the arrival of the Class of 2012, while, truth be told, spending the final week of my summer at the Jersey Shore. A politics addict from way back, I naturally took a break from the boardwalk and beach and tuned into CNN for the interviews of Barack Obama and John McCain with Pastor Rick Warren at the Saddleback Church in California.

One segment of those interviews leapt out at me. Pastor Warren asked both of the candidates about what he called their “worldviews.” It struck me as the pastor’s way of trying to ask the candidates about their personal faith without seeming pushy or religiously intrusive. It was a good tactic, a good first step toward the deep end of the political pool. It gave them a chance to begin explaining the big picture or, better, the Big Picture as they see it. It occurred to me that Georgetown aims to invite you to do the same thing, to begin constructing your own version of that explanation. That construction process will, if you let it, continue for the rest of your life.

In June, Fr. Chris Steck, S.J., and I had a chat about the way Georgetown advertises itself to prospective students. As you might imagine, that is a perennially controversial topic of conversation in the Jesuit community. In the course of our conversation, Fr. Steck came up with what I think is a great idea for a slogan: “Georgetown: Four Years of Asking the Big Questions.” It struck me that it was in fact my Georgetown undergraduate experience that set me on the path of big question asking. And that has made all the difference, not just in the vocational path I’ve followed but in the quality of life I’ve enjoyed since graduation.

The quality of your life matters to Georgetown. That’s why if we remain faithful to our Jesuit and Catholic tradition, we will never settle for a self-understanding that views Georgetown’s purpose as merely preparing employees for careers or training future scholars or even creating new knowledge for humanity. All of these endeavors are important of course, but none of them tells the whole Georgetown story. We invite you to something much bigger and, frankly, much better and more fully human than any of those partial understandings of what your Georgetown experience is meant to be about.

By joining the project of your life to the project of Georgetown’s life, you have become part of a great experiment. That experiment was initiated on our hilltop by Archbishop John Carroll in 1789 and continues to this very day. It’s an experiment designed to discover whether a school in the Jesuit and Catholic tradition can plant itself at the crossroads of power in a young-at-heart democracy and on that good ground educate young people who are well prepared to make a difference in the life of the Church, the Republic and the world — and to be better spouses and parents — because they have good answers to the big questions.

Ours is a bold experiment and one animated by the conviction that the life of the mind and the challenge of human action can only be properly and fully understood in the context of faith seeking understanding. We offer you all the resources of faith and reason, and we invite you to begin, with confidence, humility and seriousness of purpose, your Georgetown experience.

Coming to Georgetown as an undergraduate changed my life forever. My hope, and my bet, is that Georgetown will do the same for you. And, by the way, if you happen to live on Fourth Darnall, you’re welcome for the good karma you’re inheriting. A great bunch of guys lived on that floor in 1978-79, Hoyas who gradually learned from one another’s successes and failures, happily bled Blue and Gray and joyfully reveled in one another’s good company. That too is part of Georgetown’s living tradition. Welcome to the Hilltop.

Fr. Ryan Maher, S.J., is an assistant dean for Georgetown College. He can be reached at rjm27@georgetown.edu. AS THIS JESUIT SEES IT… appears every other Friday, with Maher and Fr. James Schall, S.J., alternating as writers.