From Study at Home to Study Abroad

image of zoom meeting with a professor
By Chris Meng ’23 When I returned home from campus in March 2020, little did I know that I would spend nearly every single hour of every day in my house for the next year. Having grown up in a small town, I had always valued experiencing different environments. So much for that. It’s no wonder I became interested in participating in Pomona’s domestic exchange program with Sw...
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From Foreigner to Foreigner: Los Angeles to Seoul

karaoke in Korea
By Kensi Martinez '21 Anyone who knows me can attest to my avid love for Quora, a question-and-answer website where you can find people from the likes of regular high school students to Barack Obama himself. I can spend anywhere from one to eight hours on the site daily, learning personal opinions, facts, and news—and sometimes writing them myself as the fourth-most viewed w...
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Looking for Paradise and Finding Peanuts

Paul Kiefer in Morocco
By Paul Kiefer ’20 In a few important ways, Morocco did not feel especially foreign to me. It is a Muslim country, and I am a Muslim. It is largely an Arabic-speaking country, and I speak enough Arabic to navigate comfortably. Moroccan cities are dense, but I have spent enough time living in college dorms to feel comfortable in close quarters. I went to Morocco expecting to ...
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Building Friendships with Sweet Treats

David Song in rain in Hong Kong
By David Song ’20 In the fall semester of 2018, I studied abroad in Hong Kong through Syracuse University and their partnership with the City University of Hong Kong’s SCOPE (School of Continuing and Professional Education) program. Through this program, I spent much of my time with the fellow participants of the Syracuse & SCOPE joint-program: I lived with them in the s...
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The “Abroad” in Study Abroad

By Libby Rose ‘19 (second of two posts by Libby Rose about studying abroad) During my study abroad program at University College London (UCL), I had four weeks off after classes ended to travel, and I learned so much about myself through that experience. I went on a European tour with two of my friends who were studying abroad at Cambridge. In just two weeks, we went to B...
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How I read a book, thought of a project, and got Pomona to pay for it

By Laura Zhang ‘19 Believe me, if someone had told me when I came to Pomona that I would spend my summer after junior year working on a 5-week project with an animal welfare organization in northern Vietnam I wouldn’t have believed them for a second. Now, in my senior year, I’ve had the experience of taking a transformative class that led to an amazing opportunity abroad. ...
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Studying Abroad … Again?

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...
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Oceanía Es un Continente?

By Sarah Binau '19 I was in my Spanish class at the public university (La Universidad de Chile) in Santiago, the sprawling, smoggy city at the foot of the Andes in the noodle-like country of Chile. Our professor, Claudia, paused during the lesson and remarked that our class had representatives from every continent. My classmates were a global mix: Brazilian, Japanese, Portug...
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You Do Not Know What You Do Not Know

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...
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From the Acropolis to the Athens Lawn Tennis Club: Being a Student Athlete Abroad

By Arianna Chen '19 Tennis has always been a constant in my life and it shows. I'm pretty sure some people have only seen me in athletic wear and think that my tennis rackets are permanently glued to my hands like Thor and his hammer. Being a student-athlete has inevitably been central to my identity. My desire to study abroad has also been a constant in my life-the abili...
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