"What Matters to Me and Why" is a monthly talk and discussion series featuring USC faculty and administrators. The series encourages reflection about values, beliefs, and motivation in the lives of those who help shape our university. Presenters are encouraged to talk about choices made, difficulties encountered, and commitments solidified.

WMMW also represents a creative solution to an important and often unrecognized problem in the university setting: the separation of intellectual life from personal and spiritual issue. For some time, students have been asking for more informal contact with faculty. They have expressed their desire to encounter faculty and administrators as rounded human beings, professional models, and mentors. The people who shape USC, who teach students the ways of their particular disciplines, and who help them develop marketable skills also have a great deal to pass on in terms of worldly wisdom, moral guidance, and sources of spiritual strength.

At each WMMW session, the featured guest spends about twenty minutes addressing the topic "What Matters to Me and Why," and then the floor is opened to informal dialogue for the remainder of the hour. Just as there is no one way to address the topic, so there will be no one direction in which dialogue will proceed. The WMMW program maintains an arena in which people can talk about important, personally charged questions in an open, mutually respectful way.

Susan Laemmle, former USC Dean of Religious Life, started WMMW circa 1999. Claude Zachary, University Archivist began recording the talks on audiocassette tapes in 2002. When Varun Soni succeeded Rabbi Laemmle in 2007, Zachary continued to produce audio recordings until 2009, when Dean Soni began to have students create video recordings. Some of the recordings in the collection were copied from DVDs or downloaded from YouTube. The WMMW program was paused in 2020.

The What Matters to Me and Why recordings hold audio and video recordings from the monthly talks and discussions.