In his remarks to new University of Chicago students, President Paul Alivisatos welcomed the Class of 2030 and incoming transfer students into a community "famous for its culture of contestation” and its intellectual rigor.
“You made a choice to take a path toward cultivating a life of the mind,” he said at the Sept. 23 welcome Convocation for incoming College students in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. “Here, we consider this to be the path for forming a Chicago Mind, a path that, for those who actively choose it … is filled with delight and joy.”
Students will be challenged at different points along the paths of their intellectual journeys, he said, especially as they learn and work with and without machines in the AI era.
Alivisatos urged the students to be “ethical, skeptical and ambitious” about technology, leveraging something even the most formidable AI agents do not have: agency.
"These are powerful tools that have already enabled stunning discoveries," Alivisatos said in his Orientation Week address. "But make no mistake: You are and will remain the true agents of human knowledge."
Students who honor that commitment, he said, will graduate with something the machines can't supply.
"When you leave this place, having chosen this path, you will have superpowers of the mind," Alivisatos said. "You will have cultivated a Chicago Mind."
Melina Hale, dean of the College, explained to the newest undergraduates how the College and the Core curriculum will prepare them to respond to the question of who they want to be when they grow up with an answer that isn’t defined by a profession.
“The Core will shape how you engage with the world and cultivate your own individual humanity,” she said. “It also reinforces our collective humanity, especially when diverse viewpoints are offered, argued and probed.”
UChicago Trustee Michele Kang, AB’83, and James Nondorf, vice president for enrollment and student advancement and dean of college admissions and financial aid, also delivered remarks to the Class of 2030. Upon the ceremony's conclusion, students were cheered on by family, friends and members of the UChicago community as they walked in the cherished traditional procession across the Main Quadrangles and through Cobb Gate on their way to take their class photo at Stagg Field.
Move-in, graduate Convocation ceremonies
New students officially embarked upon their UChicago journeys with the Sept. 22 start of Orientation Week.
Filled with traditions and activities, the week helps new undergraduate and graduate students get acclimated to campus as they prepare to begin their lives at UChicago.
On Tuesday, College students moved into campus dorms with help from their families and resident assistants. Also that morning, new students from UChicago’s graduate schools and divisions received their official introduction to the University and its guiding principles during welcome Convocations in Rockefeller Chapel.
For the first time, Ph.D. candidates and master's students each had their own ceremony to kick off the week's programming. These events featured remarks from President Paul Alivisatos and other UChicago leaders as well as an Aims of Graduate Education address from Prof. Adriana Z. Robertson, the Donald N. Pritzker Professor of Business Law.
Other activities for new graduate students included an afternoon resource fair and info sessions as well as a welcome to international students.
On Thursday, Prof. Kenneth Warren delivered the Aims of Education address, an honored tradition dating to 1961 in which a UChicago faculty member is invited to speak to incoming College students.
Warren talked about the Class of 2030 about entering the University in the age of AI. Despite the rise in technology, Warren reminded students about the need to think deeply about the world around them.
“The time of education, if it is to be worthwhile even in the time of AI, should remain what it always has been at its best,” said Warren, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor of English and Literature, “namely, a time for human thought—a time for thinking hard about and producing words about the world with all of its complexities, difficulties and inhumanities, with the understanding that, for the time being, you can feel OK only thinking about it.”
Warren's remarks at Rockefeller Chapel were followed by small-group discussions for students with UChicago faculty in the residence halls.
—A version of this story is published on the University of Chicago College website.
