Sambuddha Chattopadhyay ’21 remembers spending hours in the Winthrop dining hall as an undergraduate, just talking. “I really enjoyed getting together with a few people, sharing your opinions, working through things, and getting things wrong sometimes,” he says. “I learned a lot from these discussions.”
He’s continued to seek out these conversations as an inaugural Intellectual Vitality Fellow, a pilot program seeking to promote ethical reflection and a culture of civil disagreement in undergraduate community life. He was one of 27 tutors and proctors in the Houses selected to help students grapple with hard topics together.
Chattopadhyay began serving as a nonresident tutor three years ago. He started the PhD program at Harvard Griffin GSAS not long after he graduated from the College and is now a theoretical physicist working at the intersection of quantum optics and condensed matter physics.
“For me, the Intellectual Vitality program is about having extremely difficult conversations in a way that allows you to make mistakes,” says Chattopadhyay. Last spring, he and a group of six undergraduates watched thought-provoking movies together and then went to dinner to talk about them. “We watched the Act of Killing, which is about Indonesian genocide,” he says.
“We talked for three hours afterwards. One of the students told me that this was the most productively uncomfortable they’ve been on campus.”
He believes small conversations build and grow into a culture of intellectual vitality. “Harvard students have this incredible capacity to create extremely meaningful conversations. They're curious people,” he says. “There is such an appetite for this.”
These stories and more are made possible by the Harvard College Fund and Graduate School Fund. Learn more in the Impact of Giving: Annual Report of Associates.