Academic Resources

Will I Sound Like Beyoncé?

Posted on November 5, 2020November 4, 2020 by Sonam Rikha

By Sonam Rikha ’24 Have you ever gone on a walk with your friends, and all of a sudden you hear a loud, high-pitched, angelic voice? Chances are, if you followed that voice, you would stumble across a little Asian girl singing at the top of her lungs as her embarrassed brother follows at a distance. Ever since I was a little kid, I loved singing and was pretty open about it....

Taking Philosophy to the Public

Posted on November 2, 2020October 29, 2020 by Kevin Hua

By Kevin Hua ‘23 About two years ago I first encountered philosophy in an untraditional fashion over the Internet–it all began when a schoolmate of mine urged me to check out “a cool online philosophy course on death.” My high school in China did not have philosophy in its curriculum, but among the general public and high school students, the subject was considered lofty ...

Everything Oldenborg

Posted on October 20, 2020 by Chris Meng

By Chris Meng '23 The Oldenborg Center for Modern Languages and International Relations is a handful to say, so most students just refer to it as Oldenborg or Oldie for short. Built in 1966, Oldenborg is incredibly unique to Pomona, especially because we are a small college, as it is one of the only buildings that combines an international student center and language center ...

Using Machine Learning in Patient Diagnoses

Posted on September 21, 2020September 21, 2020 by Ebenezer Mensah

By Ebenezer Mensah ‘23 When I was six years old, I remember walking with my father to the doctor’s office, which was in a clinic two towns from where we lived. When we reached the Afari clinic, the only nurse on duty recorded my vital symptoms, including my temperature, pulse, and blood pressure, and told us to wait for our turn. I was the 30th person in line to meet the...

A Pitch for the Liberal Arts

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Chris Meng

students having dinner at a professor's house

By Chris Meng ‘23 “Why would you choose Pomona over a more well-known school?” As a tour guide and summer fellow for the admissions office, my peers and I discuss the most common questions we get during tours and other interactions with prospective students, and this is one of them. While my neighbors in Pennsylvania may not know Pomona, graduate schools and employers cer...

First-Year Reflections: What I Wish I Had Known Before Coming to Pomona

Posted on July 20, 2020 by Ebenezer Mensah

By Ebenezer Mensah ‘23 It seems like only yesterday that I moved into Mudd Hall as a first-year student, but autumn and winter have passed by, concluding my first year at Pomona. Reflecting on my first year, these are the things I wish I had known before coming to Pomona. Professors want to know you Coming from an educational system that was not easily accessible, ...

What’s in a Major?

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Chris Meng

By Chris Meng ‘23 What are you studying in college? What do you want to be when you grow up? Those types of questions came flooding in during my senior year of high school, and I quickly learned it was easier to give a scripted answer than to reveal the honest truth that I simply didn’t know. To all my classmates who knew they wanted to be doctors or physical therapists or v...

My First CS Class (As an Art Major)

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Alicia Garza

By Alicia Garza ‘22 When I think of lab, the first thing that pops to mind is the darkroom, or the drawing studio, or the digital lab. When I signed up for a computer science class this semester and saw the Lab section of the course, I knew I was in for a whole other kind of experience, a different kind of creativity. "Intro to Computer Science with Topics in AI" is my fi...

The Beautiful Flexibility of a Small(ish) School

Posted on November 13, 2019 by Chris Meng

By Chris Meng ‘23 Pomona College has all the amazing perks of a small school without sacrificing the overwhelming variety of resources of a bigger college. If it weren’t for the flexibility and spirit of exploration built into the values of Pomona, I wouldn’t be here today as a first-year student. Let me tell you about my winding path to Pomona. To begin, I wasn’t accepte...

Getting to Kyrgyzstan

Posted on August 8, 2019 by Dakota Crookston

By Dakota Crookston ‘21 My parents met online, I found Pomona through a web search, and I’m flying to Kyrgyzstan in seven hours because I googled “intensive russian study summer.” My trek started late last August, when I was scrubbing the internet for summer opportunities to learn Russian abroad. Unfortunately, the well-known Critical Languages Scholarship was out of the ...