Dear Pomona College Community,
Veterans Day arrives on Friday, and I’d like to start this week with recognizing and honoring the members of our community who have served the U.S. in this way.
Veterans bring important experiences and perspectives to our campus, and our admissions team today devotes significant effort and resources to helping veterans find the path to Pomona.
This year, the admissions team has returned to in-person outreach events on military bases, visiting both Camp Pendleton and Miramar Air Station in the San Diego area. We’ve also held in-person and online events with veterans’ resource centers at community colleges around the country.
Pomona is one of a small number of institutions that do not require veterans to use their Veterans Administration benefits to help pay for college. This allows them to use those benefits for graduate-level opportunities such as medical or business school.
We have seven military veterans in our current student population, with four of them – Isaiah Orlando Escobar ’25, Josh Feng ’25, Kimin Han ’24 and Brandon Lau ’24 – part of a cohort of transfer students who started at Pomona this year.
We will recognize all the military veterans among our students, staff and faculty at our annual Veterans Day gathering this Friday, Nov. 11. The entire campus community is invited to join us in saluting them.
Many noteworthy campus events are coming in the weeks ahead, including a full schedule of music concerts and the next Fall Faculty Lecture, set for November 16, with Professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky discussing “The Most Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court and the Current Constitutional Crisis,” in a talk drawn from her testimony before a congressional committee and a White House commission.
For liberal arts learning at any hour, the fifth season of Sagecast, the official Pomona College podcast, kicked off last week with Assistant Professor Rosalia Romerodiscussing modern and contemporary Latin American art history.
In the tech realm, our faculty and students have fascinating work underway. A group of computer science students is working on autonomous robots with Assistant Professor Anthony Clark. After conducting research around the globe, Associate Professor of History Angelina Chin is developing web resources to inform the public on assistive technologies designed to help the elderly and people with disabilities. And physics majors Genevieve DiBari ’23 and Liliana Valle ’23, working with Professor Janice Hudgings, had their paper on the use of robotic insect toys for online lab teaching published in a physics journal.
We’ve also had good news on the athletic field, with women’s soccer taking its third straight conference tournament championship – and Head Coach Jen Scanlon landing her 200th career win – this past weekend. Recently, men’s cross-country won its second straight conference title, and, this Saturday, the football team takes on Claremont-Mudd-Scripps at Merritt Field for the SCIAC title and an automatic berth in the NCAA Division III Championship tournament. Kickoff is at 1 p.m.
On a final note, I urge everyone who is eligible to turn out and vote for tomorrow’s U.S. midterm elections if you have not already done so. I’m proud of the civic engagement our community has shown with high voter participation in recent years, so let’s continue on that course.
With best wishes,
Gabi