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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Everything Oldenborg

students dining at Oldenborg
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 ...
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Being in Bishtek

Dakota with a raptor
By Dakota Crookston, ‘21 Moving beyond mosaic tabletops and colorful couches, the lot of us had taken our seats at a table in the back. The booth was grand, tucked behind thick drapes and lavishly upholstered. Our rowdy bunch eyed each other apprehensively. I knew that this moment would come eventually, but I thought it would happen after my own decision. I had not expect...
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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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Getting to Kyrgyzstan

Dakota on Cecil the Sagehen's back
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 ...
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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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Tips for Incoming New Students (or, Mistakes I’ve Made Over the Past Three Years)

By Cheryl Yau '19 As one of the Head Mentors for the International Student Mentor Program (ISMP), I have had the opportunity to interact with many new students. Questions I’m often asked include: what would you have done differently? What do you wish you had known as a new student? Unsurprisingly, there are many things I wish someone had told me, and, with that, here is Cher...
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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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