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Pomona College Magazine is published three times a year by Pomona College
550 N. College Ave, Claremont, CA 91711
Online Editor: Mark Kendall
For editorial matters:
Editor: Mark Wood
Phone: (909) 621-8158
Fax: (909) 621-8203
PCM Editorial Guidelines
Contact Alumni Records for changes of address, class notes, or notice
of births or deaths.
Phone: (909) 621-8635
Fax: (909) 621-8535
Email: alumni@pomona.edu
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Alumni Voices
One Year Later
(Or Why ’03 is Still OK)
In May, I had the pleasure of visiting Pomona for Commencement 2004. It
was my first visit to campus since graduating a year before, and it was
at once warmly familiar and sadly uncomfortable.
Talking and enjoying the California sun at the campus center with my
fellow graduates and traveling companions, Nathan Fisher ’03 and Aaron
Goldsmith ’03, felt easy and natural. But when we took the inevitable
alumni tour of our old dorm rooms, it was awkward to see the thinly
veiled looks of disapproval from the current inhabitants. Neither those
rooms, nor Pomona in general, belonged to us anymore. We were just
“those guys who already graduated.”
I thought about this on Sunday during Commencement, my nostalgia
building to a crescendo as the proceedings in Big Bridges mirrored the
day I had become one of “those guys.”
It’s a Hard Knock Life...
On Class Day. May 17, 2003, I explained that our class banner slogan—’03
is OK—meant our parents, teachers and advisers could stop worrying about
us, because we were finally ready and able to take care of ourselves. On
May 18, presiding over his final Commencement ceremony, President Peter
Stanley sent us forth to bear our added riches in trust for mankind. The
next day, after throwing away the majority of my worldly possessions in
order to make the noon deadline for moving out, I left Pomona the same
way I had arrived four years earlier—in a blue SuperShuttle van,
sobbing.
Like Ralph in William Golding’s "The Lord of the Flies," I cried for the
lost innocence of mankind but specifically for what I felt would be the
rude awakening of the idealistic members of the Class of ’03 to the
harsh realities of post-Pomona life. Now, a year later, I found that the
recurring theme in conversations with my fellow grads was the difficulty
of adjusting to a brave new world after our banishment from the happiest
campus in the land.
Nate and Aaron had both crashed headfirst into reality almost
immediately, as Aaron described his first few months out of Pomona as “a
period of unemployment and depression,” while Nate admitted that he had
sometimes cried himself to sleep. For senior-year roommates, Sarah Rich
’03 and Sara Sherrod ’03, the realization came later in the year when
the daily grind of nine to five—or in some cases nine to six, seven,
eight or later—became a source of stress. After moving to New York in
August 2003, to begin her job as a research assistant at MDRC, a
nonprofit social policy research organization, Sarah described the
difficult transition “from the everyday freedom of loosely structured
time at college to the strict daily hours of the working world.”
Likewise, Sara said she found her new role as an assistant director at
the Score! educational center in Arcadia, California, unfulfilling at
the outset. Putting in 10 hours a day, she discovered that she was too
exhausted to enjoy what little spare time she had.
As a junior analyst for Deutsche Bank in San Francisco, Gil Nye ’03
topped all of our stories, working nearly 72 hours in one stretch to
meet a deadline. (He called to tell me this on a Saturday afternoon
while taking a break at the office.)
For a period of time, I too found myself working late as an executive
trainee at the offices of Ruder Finn, a leading public relations agency
in New York. I didn’t really mind though, since it gave me an excuse to
avoid going home. Unable to afford a studio apartment in New York
City—or to find a roommate from Pomona like so many of my peers—I wound
up sharing a three-bedroom apartment in Queens for eight months with two
roommates I found through the most widely-used resource of our
generation, www.craigslist.com. The roommate I met before moving in was a
socially awkward 30-year-old European man, the one I met later was a
40-plus year-old divorced man who impersonated Austin Powers on the
streets of New York to earn his keep. I quickly grew to hate them both.
The Sun Will
Come Out Tomorrow...
Gradually, the tears dried up, and as the initial shock of entering the
real world wore off and the conditions of my new life improved, I
stopped longing to return to the safety of Pomona.
At Ruder Finn, I was promoted to assistant account executive, with my
own office. More importantly, I got to know my coworkers and started to
feel that I belonged on the team. The promotion also offered me the
opportunity to move on up to the East Side, to a deluxe apartment in the
sky.
Sara’s outlook on life improved in the second half of the year when she
did a complete 180-degree turnaround on her job. After a heart-to-heart
with her manager, Sara realized there was more to her job. “I saw for
the first time how many skills I was building,” she said. “By the end of
2004, I’ll have the valuable experience of basically running my own
business.”
The turnaround moment for Patty Van Kuran ’03 came when she made the
opposite decision—to leave her job. Even though she was living five
minutes from the beautiful sandy beaches of Hawaii, her life in paradise
was tainted by long hours spent in an unrewarding job with a nonprofit
youth organization. “I realized that I had no more to learn in the
position and could be using my time for much better things. I had to
swallow my pride and resign. Even though I hated the feeling of giving
up, I knew it was for the best.” Shortly thereafter, her decision was
vindicated when she found a human resources job with the Bank of Hawaii
that sparked a career interest in marketing and recruiting.
As our work-lives improved—or perhaps because they did—so did our
personal lives. After graduation, Nate worked odd jobs as an interior
house painter and liquor store clerk in his hometown of Minneapolis
before packing his bags one day and moving to the Bay Area for a new
start. Through craigslist, he found not only his current job as a music
editor for Live365.com, but also a group of roommates that embraced him
as part of an extended family. In the Bay Area, Nate found old Pomona
friends, including Aaron, who has long since recovered from his initial
slump and now works as a special assistant to the Mayor’s Office in San
Francisco (where, for a brief time, his duties included marrying gay
couples). More recently, Nate said he was starting to build a new
network of friends: “Lately, I’ve been going out a lot more with people
from work or women I meet through online personal ads. Yeah, I still
love reminiscing when I’m with Pomona people but I’ve moved on, you
know? Life is beautiful!”
The Class of ’03 Is (Still) OK...
When I turned my attention back to this year’s commencement ceremony,
first-year President David Oxtoby was taking the podium to deliver his
charge to the Class of ’04. He started by recounting some of the events
of the past year, a year he described as a “trial by fire.” I chuckled
as I considered how I would add to that analogy and say that by
comparison, the next year for the new graduates of 2004 will be an
inferno of biblical proportions—from the frustration of job searches to
the loneliness of moving to new cities, to the stress of long work
weeks.
But as Patty summarized when asked to reflect upon her first
post-baccalaureate year, “Pomona is definitely a bubble, and there is
extreme culture shock when you leave. But if you get through the first
year with minimal bumps and bruises, then you are on your way to great
things.”
—Ji Chong ’03
If you are interested in writing an essay for this space on a subject of
specific interest to other alumni, please send a proposal to the editor
at mwood@pomona.edu.
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