When I came to Pomona College, I planned on being ambitious, getting recognized, and getting ahead, but I certainly didn’t plan for it to happen at CMC. Whatever, though: I’m not going to complain about the opportunities I get, and it’s not like CMC is below us or anything. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I was thriving in my Cognitive Psychology (taught by the awesome Professor Gabriel Cook) in CMC.
When I started the class, I was aware that I was one of the only 3 freshmen in the class and that I was the only Pomona freshman, so I thought getting situated in class would be difficult because it wasn’t like my ID 001 class where everyone understood all of my Sagehen Freshmen problems (such as being exhausted in class because the previous night, the fire alarm went off in Mudd-Blaisdell and Gibson at 3 am). Despite not being able to connect to my classmates though, I found it easy to settle in to a class that I felt was a perfect fit for me. I am, after all, a Psychology major and I have taken psychology for 4 years in high school, so I’m pretty sure I have a strong background in psychology. The material is relatively easy to learn, partly because of my background in psychology, partly because Professor Cook really knows how to communicate the information in a comprehensible and entertaining manner, and partly because the material is just genuinely interesting.
I didn’t realize I was doing so well in the class until my first exam, though. I had my exam on Monday and I was the first one in and out of the door since the exam only took me 20 minutes (we had an entire class period, 75 minutes, to take the exam). I ended up scoring an 87% (26 out of 30 questions correct) and my results were followed by an e-mail from my professor congratulating me on my good first exam score. He even said that he wouldn’t be surprised if that ended up being my lowest exam score for that class!
Things got even better when that e-mail was followed by another one where he complimented me on my attentiveness, enthusiasm, and participation in the class and asked me to be a research assistant in his lab! Granted, I wasn’t the only one he’d asked to be a research assistant, but still, I had been planning on asking to work in his lab next semester after taking his Cognitive Psychology course and while taking his Psych Stats course, so I was stoked when he asked me in the beginning of my first semester!
I feel like I can’t stop listing out the good things that happen in that class: On Wednesday, he decided to give the entire class 2 extra points, so my grade went up from an 87% to a 93%. When my simple experiment group talked to him today about our project, he was really impressed when one of my group members, Victor, and I brought up the possibility of running an inferential statistics test to improve our project even though Victor and I are just freshmen and most of the class probably isn’t familiar with inferential stats.
I just can’t help but feel like this is what genuine, organic success is, no matter where it happens. That’s why you should never doubt the power of having the resources of the 5C’s in our reach!