29/08/2026
Georgetown University article featuring an interview of SUDAN EUBANKS (class of 1929)
Global Oved Dei Seminary & University Chaplain & Recruiter
During her first semester at Georgetown University, Sudan Eubanks (CAS ’29) had often walked past the John Main Center (https://campusministry.georgetown.edu/john-main-center-for-christian-contemplation/), not knowing what was inside. It wasn’t until she was assigned to explore the space for her theology-focused First-Year Seminar, “Magis: The Real Metaverse” with Professor Paul Heck, that she felt immediately at peace.
The John Main Center, a space designated for personal or religious-centered meditation, became a place she frequented to de-stress.
“That place brought me a lot of peace when I felt lost, spiritually or physically, like being so far from home, or when I was having a really difficult time with school, and I felt very stressed,” Eubanks said.
Due to the center’s impact on her undergraduate experience, Eubanks will become a student employee at the meditation center for the Fall 2026 semester.
Following College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) Dean David Edelstein’s announcement (https://mailchi.mp/georgetown/cas-curricular-developments-spring26-students?e=1e9fde7c67) on March 23 that First-Year Seminars (https://college.georgetown.edu/first-year-seminars/) are mandatory starting in the 2026–2027 academic year, CAS is hoping all incoming freshmen will have a similar experience.
As many first-year students navigate an unfamiliar core requirement, the Voice spoke to CAS administration, faculty, and students to understand why First-Year Seminars are considered integral to each Hoya’s experience.
Learning through conversation
The College advertises First-Year Seminars spanning five categories (https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/vlo7jnsd9vz3k2i16nec351y6tblh50l): Ways of Knowing, which aims to develop “close reading and careful research habits”; Ignatius, which intends to “cultivate each student’s individual strengths and academic curiosities” through exploring faculty-selected topics; Languages and Cultures, which works to offer students opportunities to “participate in intercultural dialogue as a way of understanding and serving the global community”; Dialogue, which aims to “develop students’ ability to communicate and act with civility, respect difference, address questions of diversity, and engage in difficult dialogues around challenging ideas”; and Big Questions, Great Reads: Cura Personalis, which “involves close readings of transformative literary texts that pose and help us to answer…key questions about being human.”
This year, there are over 50 different seminars covering a dozen different subject areas. The summer before they arrive on campus, incoming first-year students must rank five seminars from their most to least preferred, and they will be placed in one depending on availability.
First-Year Seminars were introduced to the CAS’s curriculum in 1968 to “introduce students to the intellectual community of the College and model the habits of mind central to a Jesuit education: rigorous inquiry, ethical reflection, and engaged dialogue,” Erin Force, CAS associate dean and director of First-Year Seminars, wrote in a statement to the Voice.
To carry out the shift from an elective program to a rite of passage, the college turned directly to students who had already experienced the seminars. CAS administration formed a voluntary First-Year Seminar advisory board to garner student input on marketing materials, course grouping, and logistics, such as ensuring each seminar satisfies a core requirement so students aren’t overburdened by extra coursework.
For advisory board member Aakarsh Mamawala (CAS ‘29), the new requirement represents a long-overdue institutional investment in defining what makes the college unique.
“If the MSB has their own specialties in business, and if the SFS has their own specialties in international affairs, then the College should have its own specialties in the liberal arts,” Mamawala said. “The CAS is, at its core, a liberal arts school.
And so I think that’s [what] the first year seminars do really well.”
Mamawala emphasized that a draw of these seminars is a liberal arts education through immersive field trips. In his course, “The Humanities in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds,” learning extended far beyond their classroom in Healy Hall: students visited the Dumbarton Oaks Museum, examined 13th-century printings of Dante’s “Inferno” in Special Collections, and dressed up for Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” at the Kennedy Center.
“It doesn’t get more amazing than this, being able to attend this performance with our professors, [who] were experts in the subject, with people who are freshmen like me, who are new to the school and [in] our first semester,” Mamawala said.
An unexpected turning point
Eubanks found a similar experiential push in her seminar with Professor Heck, where her eight-person class embarked on unorthodox field trips, most notably a phone-free trek through Rock Creek Park.
“We walked two hours through it. And he told us to grapple with the question, ‘What orients your soul?’” Eubanks said. “We’re all basically freshly 18, dealing with such an existential question, and just really feeling clueless as to what a right answer would be.”
Despite the surprise of being pushed into deep personal reflections at 8 a.m., Eubanks said that she found this experience to be “enriching.”
“I got to learn so much more about myself and so much more about others,” Eubanks said. “It was truly, I think, a spiritual experience, which is very unorthodox for a class.”
Though Eubanks’ mother is an ordained minister, her household was “non-denominational Christian,” and she was exposed to countless religious ideologies. After her professor tasked students to visit a local religious institution, Eubanks spoke with a community organizer at a local Catholic church and explored a faith tradition she had never experienced before.
Eubanks cited this moment in cementing the realization that her intended major of Government was not her true calling, drawing her instead to Justice and Peace Studies, concentrating on Religion, Politics, and the Common Good.
The course reshaped Eubanks’ approach to college. The following semester, she dropped a large lecture course because she missed the seminar’s open dialogue, enrolling instead in Heck’s upper-level theology course on atheism.
“I do prefer that type of form when it comes to something so philosophical or theological,” Eubanks said. “I saw that I gravitated towards that with Atheism, as Professor Heck repeated the same type of method. But also in some of my other classes that kind of had a smaller feel, and kind of wanted to incorporate that type of, like, group circle, group huddle, discussion, rather than just simply lecturing at us.”
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