When seated at a table with people you don't know, ask "what are you interested in?" or "what have you been thinking about lately?" instead of "what do you do?" – Sam Altman
When I meet another fellow college student, and I try to strike up a conversation with them. My go-to question tends to be, "What's your major?"
But I've come to realize posing that question is like running gradient descent with a small learning rate. It often takes a couple more questions (iterations) to really get to know that person or to get them talking (converge to global minimum).
I think asking "What are you interested in?", gives an immediate glimpse into the person's life, revealing how they spend their time and their passions.
I recently got asked what my life philosophy was, and I think that's a good question to ask. It did threw me off a bit, and made me think whether it's different from my values and principles. My answer was something along the lines of "I want to create value, build something that provides value for humanity. I like coding and building stuff."
Another question is I want to start asking is "What makes you happy?" I think happiness is something a lot of people pursue, and you can tell a lot about a person from their answer.
Some more lists of questions I found for better conversations