International Students – Page 2

Choose Pomona and Be Ready

Posted on April 30, 2020 by Ebenezer Mensah

By Ebenezer Mensah ‘23 It has been almost a year since I gained acceptance to Pomona, but I still remember reading my acceptance letter as if it happened yesterday. I still remember the shriek of laughter from my English teacher that pierced the still night when she read the letter, my teary eyes as I stared blankly at the computer screen, and the several times I spent readi...

Need Aware Does Not Mean No Aid

Posted on March 16, 2020 by Ebenezer Mensah

By Ebenezer Mensah ‘23 On 16th February 2019, my English teacher and I huddled up around a computer in my school’s computer laboratory in Kumasi, Ghana around 1 a.m., an hour after Pomona’s admission decisions had been released. The room was dark, and the throbbing of my heart was the only sound that could be heard in the room. The internet was slow, and the portal was takin...

Learning to Love Los Angeles

Posted on November 26, 2019 by Elias van Emmerick

By Elias van Emmerick ‘21 Pomona’s lack of name recognition is a bit of a running gag at the Claremont Colleges. Students love to joke about how their friends think they go to “Paloma,” “Panama,” or “Pavlova” College. We can point at the Forbes 2015 Best Colleges #1 ranking all we want, but Harvard we are not. Now imagine what “Pomona College” means to a 14-year old Belgi...

Caffeine in Claremont: A Comprehensive Guide

Posted on October 2, 2019 by Elias van Emmerick

By Elias van Emmerick ‘21 Back when I was young, naive, and blessedly free of endless reading assignments, I believed that college would entail sitting in aesthetically pleasing coffee shops and drinking tasty caffeinated beverages. As it turns out I do spend a good chunk of my time doing exactly that, albeit with a slightly more utilitarian intent than I’d originally expect...

Foreign Language Immersion at Pomona

Posted on September 25, 2019 by Jacinta Chen

By Jacinta Chen ‘21 In a previous blog post, I shared my academic adventure through the six breadth of study area requirements to highlight how easy it is to explore many disciplines for Pomona students. In order to fulfill the foreign language requirement, Pomona generally requires students to either pass the third semester or higher of a language course, earn a 4 or 5 on a...

My First Year at Pomona: Seven Things I’m Grateful For

Posted on July 31, 2019July 31, 2019 by Becky Zhang

By Becky Zhang ‘22 A few days ago, my best friend (who took Intro to Psychology and had many a fun fact to share with me throughout the semester) shared that gratitude was an effective remedy for all sorts of maladies. She dropped some statistics on the scientifically-proven benefits of practicing gratitude: an extra half-hour of sleep, and so on. Whether or not th...

Metrolink to Amtrak: Time on the Train

Posted on May 2, 2019 by Becky Zhang

By Becky Zhang ‘22 My first semester at Pomona was unforgettably fun and eye-opening. While my friends and I made ample use of the seven dining halls, five campuses, sunshine, cafés, and thrift stores in Claremont, we occasionally took the Metrolink train into L.A. in search of places and activities to explore outside the 5C bubble. We really made use of the city, a short an...

Studying Abroad … Again?

Posted on September 18, 2018 by cyhg2015

By Cheryl Yau '19 31 Dec 2017. I board an almost empty plane at Changi Airport, Singapore. Strike of midnight, and I am in transit at Doha Airport, Qatar. 1 Jan 2018. Here I am, in Cape Town, South Africa. I exit immigration to find a little crowd waiting for me—our (brilliant) program coordinator, Pieter, and some of the other students on the program who've arrived s...

You Do Not Know What You Do Not Know

Posted on April 27, 2018April 27, 2018 by cyhg2015

By Cheryl Yau '19 A key aspect of a liberal arts education that I really relish is the serendipitous exposure to ideas and people I would have not actively sought out on my own. In my very first semester at college, I registered for a class that I thought was titled “Violence, Media and Transnational Justice.” I later found out during the first class that I had misread the c...