Ignatius Seminars - Georgetown College

“My Ignatius Seminar pushed me to accomplish things I did not know I was capable of. The pride I felt after accomplishing all of the research and the intimate attention I received in a small seminar classroom are irreplaceable. It was a great way to start off my college experience.”
—Michelle Laughlin, College ’10

The Ignatius Seminars offer undergraduates in their initial semester of university instruction the opportunity to study in a small group setting with a member of the full-time faculty. Drawing upon the educational insights of Ignatius of Loyola, each seminar seeks to cultivate the two pedagogical goods associated with the Ignatian ideal of cura personalis. Because the small-class setting enables the professor to recognize the particular set of strengths and educational needs that each student brings to the class, the seminars create a teaching environment in which each student can be mentored in a personal, even individualized, manner by the faculty. That is the first goal of this cura personalis approach. As the second goal, these seminars can help to elicit in the student an intellectual response that is personally integrative and holistic. The professor’s own particular intellectual pursuits provide students with lived, tangible examples of the interplay of mind and spirit, of disciplined work and intellectual excitement, of academic rigor and creative play.

• All first-year students in Georgetown College.

Application procedures

• Admitted first-year students are sent application materials in early June.

Course/credit equivalencies

• 1 course and 3 credits

Semester-long or year-long?

• The Ignatius Seminar is a fall semester commitment only.

Requirements fulfilled?

• Counts as one elective course toward graduation.

Enroll in an Ignatius Seminar and another option?

• Accepted students may enroll concurrently in both the Science and Society Seminar and an Ignatius Seminar, as long as there are no overlaps in meeting times.

Recent Ignatius Seminar topics include:

• Strategy for Games and Puzzles

• Energy Crisis

• Brains, Persons, “Otherness”

• Healthtalk in Public and in Private

• Socrates to Bioethics

• The Present and the Past

• Medieval Emotion

• Shakespeare: For All Ages and Stages

• Language Around Us,

• Language Inside Us

• Sacred Spaces of Washington