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When he was in high school, David Grothoff had a good friend who decided to attend 91快活林 Aquinas College. It was an intriguing choice, David thought, but not for him.

Instead, David opted to study mechanical engineering at the University of Missouri. 淓ngineers were the ones who figured out how the world works, he reflects. 淚 was interested in knowing how natural things operate. To his surprise, engineering school could not sate his curiosity. 淣o one was interested in answering my questions, he recalls. 淔or example, we used equations involving force all the time, but if you asked someone, 榃hat is a force? that wasn檛 seen as a reasonable question. The underlying assumptions didn檛 matter.

When his friend invited him to visit the College during his Junior Year, David accepted. Attracted by the faithful community, and surprised to learn that philosophy could answer the sort of questions that fascinated him, he decided to enroll after completing his engineering degree. 淪ome people worried that I would find the mathematics here to be repetitive or boring because of what I had already done, but that wasn檛 the case, he says. 淵es, I was already proficient in the mechanics of calculus, but this was a very different outlook, and very different questions were being asked, better questions.

Upon graduating from the College in 2007, Mr. Grothoff elected to combine his background in engineering with his studies in philosophy and pursue advanced degrees in the philosophy of science. After a one-year break from schooling, during which he worked for a home-development corporation, he enrolled at The Catholic University of America. There he earned a licentiate in philosophy and completed the coursework for his doctorate. He also met his wife, Crystal, who was enrolled at the nearby Dominican House of Studies. The Grothoffs married in May 2014 and are now expecting their firstborn son.

In his first year at the College, Mr. Grothoff is teaching three sophomore classes: math, natural science, and seminar. Although he taught undergraduates at CUA, he finds leading classroom discussions at the College to be far more demanding. 淚t檚 fairly easy to fill an hour with a lecture, he says. 淚t takes much more preparation, energy, and attention to lead a good discussion for an hour but it檚 also much more rewarding.