Visiting Pomona College, the liberal arts college that is part of the 5C Claremont Colleges.
Takeaways:
- Pomona College has the benefits of being part of 5 colleges (5C) with a larger university setting of about 6,000 undergraduate students but with the intimacy of a small college
- Pomona College is around 1600 students, about 400 per year
- 50% of the students are BIPOC which is the highest I’ve seen for a college that small
- About 18% of the students are First Generation
- Students have access to 6.5 dining halls as they can eat at any of the 5C dining halls
- Students can take up to 1/3 of their classes outside of their own college
- There is a core curriculum Breadth of Study requirements. Area 1: Criticism, Analysis, and Contextual Study of Works of the Human Imagination. Area 2: Social Institutions and Human Behavior. Area 3: History, Values, Ethics, and Cultural Studies. Area 4: Physical and Biological Sciences. Area 5: Mathematical and Formal Reasoning. Area 6: Creation and Performance of Works of Art and Literature.
- Additional Academic Requirements include a Foreign Language Requirement of 3 semesters (though you can place out), Physical Education Requirement (which can be playground games like Tag and Duck Duck Goose), and The Overlay Requirements.
- Overlay requirements (the Writing Intensive, Speaking Intensive, and Analyzing Difference requirements) are requirements that may be completed with courses that also satisfy a Breadth of Study area.
- The average class size is 15.
- It’s a normal thing to have lunch with your professor. Bonus: the professor always pays!
- Most Pomona students do at least one internship. A subway stop nearby makes it easy to commute to downtown Los Angeles.
- Pomona College offers 48 fields of study/majors in the arts, humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and interdisciplinary fields.
- Pomona students typically complete a capstone project or thesis their senior year
- Pomona College has a 2 billion dollar endowment, putting it in the Top 5 for Endowment Dollars per Student for U.S. colleges
- Pomona offers grants for on-campus and off-campus internships so that students can work and get paid a fair wage.
To examine any book more closely at Amazon, please click on image of book.
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
p.s. Related posts (all my posts on getting into college are here):
Visiting Pepperdine University
Visiting Columbia University and Tips for Applying to College
Why Full Ride Athletic Scholarships Are Rare
Top 10 Life Skills Kids Need Before College
My books:
Food for the Future: Sustainable Farms Around the World
- Junior Library Guild Gold selection
- Selected as one of 100 Outstanding Picture Books of 2023 by dPICTUS and featured at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair
- Starred review from School Library Journal
- Chicago Library’s Best of the Best
- Imagination Soup’s 35 Best Nonfiction Books of 2023 for Kids
Amazon / Barefoot Books / Signed or Inscribed by Me
Working in higher ed communications, I see a lot of college magazines, which is how Pomona got on my radar. I have been super impressed with this school and if I were making a choice today (and wanted to go to the West Coast), Pomona would be on the top of that list.