When I began teaching at Cornell last year, one of the first things I learned surprised me: Many of my students initially found office hours intimidating. Some admitted they thought office hours were only for those struggling in class; others believed this weekly time was reserved for “exceptional” students aiming to impress. If you’re managing just fine (or fine enough), the assumption commonly goes, there’s no reason to show up.
That’s why, in this first piece of a series I’m calling “the basics” of learning on campus, I want to begin here. Office hours are not just for those struggling. For me, they’re often the best moments of my week. During and just after class — whether in office hours or on a quick walk back to the Arts Quad — those conversations are when the classroom feels most alive.
Three years ago, Sun columnist Julia Poggi wrote that she wished she’d had more chances to get to know her professors, to meet them as people rather than as distant figures at the front of the room. The size of Cornell’s classes, particularly in the sciences, often makes that harder than at smaller liberal arts colleges, she rightly argued. I often feel the same in reverse. Office hours offer that chance. They’re not simply about clarifying an assignment or asking what will be on the exam. They are about connection — about discovering who is really in the room together.
This matters even more in courses where the topics are heavy. In my spring seminar on war and genocide, we wrestled with difficult histories. During office hours, I watched the weight of that material ease slightly as students shared not only their questions but their personal reactions. We spoke about family stories, about fears for the future, about what it means to live ethically in the present. Those conversations built the trust that carried the class through the semester.
Office hours matter because they are profoundly human. They work through trust, listening, and the kind of community that grows only face-to-face. In this sense, AI can help all of us in the classroom — drafting an essay outline, suggesting further readings, even simulating dialogue (more on this in future columns). But here’s the point: AI cannot build trust. It cannot look you in the eye when you hesitate, or hear the catch in your voice when the reading hits too close to home. It cannot create the community that grows when people risk honesty with one another. That part of learning — fragile, human, relational — belongs, and will continue to belong, to the people who meet in a classroom.
The value of office hours also cuts both ways. Students often imagine that knowledge flows in a single direction — from professor to class, from facts to exams, from notes to comprehension. Yet some of my most important insights last year came in the other direction. This past spring, a student’s offhand question about AI tools and Holocaust memory led me down a path that eventually became a peer-reviewed journal article, now circulating internationally. Discovery works best when it is shared. Office hours are where you glimpse that professors are not finished products, but fellow travelers.
So consider this a gentle nudge. Showing up isn’t only about fixing a citation or asking if a certain text will be covered on an exam. It’s about embedding yourself into a web of relationships that sustains you here. Cornell can be an overwhelming place — thousands of faces, deadlines stacking up, identities shifting as you grow into adulthood. The small act of knocking on a professor’s door, or clicking on that Zoom link, and sitting down for a conversation can anchor you in all of that. It is an investment in yourself, and in a relationship that may outlast your time on campus.
Office hours remind us that education is not just the transfer of knowledge. They are not remedial, but above all relational. They happen in the back-and-forth of conversation, in the quiet recognition that someone is listening to you as more than a name on a roster. Sometimes the answer to your question matters less than the fact that you dared to ask it.
Now that we are entering the time when first exams are returned and first papers graded, the door is all the more open. What you may find there is not only an answer, but a connection.
Jan Burzlaff is an Opinion Columnist and a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program for Jewish Studies. Office Hours (Open Door Edition) is his weekly dispatch to the Cornell community — a professor’s reflections on teaching, learning and the small moments that make a campus feel human. Readers can submit thoughts and questions anonymously through the Tip Sheet here. He can also be reached at profjburzlaff@cornellsun.com.
