Plenty of folks consider campus radio station KSPC 88.7 FM an essential part of their daily routines.

When California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a statewide stay-at-home order in March, that became official in a manner of speaking: Broadcasting was deemed an essential service along with other media.

The only problem was that all the student DJs were gone after the closing of campus. But Erica Tyron SC ’92, Pomona’s director of student media and KSPC station manager, kept the station going at first by patching together pre-recorded or archival shows and public service announcements. Soon students and alumni began sending in prerecorded shows on MP3 files though Box or Dropbox. A few local community and alumni DJs dropped by the studio.

But one student, Hannah Avalos ’21, started broadcasting her Friday show live from her home in Whittier, spanning the 25 miles to campus via a Zoom connection that gives her mouse-control access to the KSPC studio in Thatcher Music Building.

For Avalos, the high-wire adrenaline of being live sustains her in the stay-at-home era—all via technology undreamed of when KSPC first signed on to the airwaves in 1956.

“It’s kind of like an outing for me,” Avalos says. “It’s an activity, more than another task I have to do. It’s a really nuanced difference, but I think having it at a set time is more like having an appointment or a fun activity, rather than another homework assignment or a work assignment.”

Eight Pomona seniors were awarded prestigious Fulbright fellowships for world travel and teaching English, though the Fulbright program also delayed the start of its fellowships until after January 1, 2021. Here are the winners from the Class of 2020.

Tyler Bunton, an English major from Hamden, Conn., has been selected to teach English in Brazil.

Jordan Carethers, an international relations and French double major from Bloomfield Hills, Mich., was selected to teach English in rural Taiwan.

Evan Chuu, a linguistics major from Arcadia, Calif., will teach English in Malaysia.

Oliver Dubon, a music major from Palmyra, Va., was selected to go to Estonia on a research award.

Netta Kaplan, a linguistics major from St. Paul, Minn., was selected to teach English in Turkey.

Daphnide Nicole, an international relations major from Portland, Ore., was selected to teach English in Senegal.

Aleksandr Thomas, an international relations major from Pasadena, Calif., was selected to teach English in Russia.

Kim Tran, a public policy analysis major from Chicago, Ill., plans to teach English in Vietnam.

With the campus closed, there have been lots of wildlife sightings, including everything from owls to coyotes. In this photo, a family of raccoons peeks out of their hiding place in a storm drain on College Avenue, between the President’s House and Carnegie Hall. —Photo by Lupe Castaneda

Listen in on enlightening conversations with some of Pomona’s most interesting alumni with Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College. Here is a sampling of this season’s offerings, now available at pomona.edu/sagecast:

Jennifer Doudna ’85
winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for her work with a gene-editing tool that has revolutionized  genetic research

Mac Barnett ’04
author of such beloved children’s books as Extra Yarn and The Wolf, the Duck and the Mouse

Anjali Kamat ’00
award-winning investigative reporter who covered the Arab uprisings in Egypt and Libya for Al Jazeera

Lynda Obst ‘72
renowned film producer of such groundbreaking films as The Fisher King, Sleepless in Seattle, Interstellar and more

Bill Keller ’70
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former executive editor of The New York Times 

Richard Preston ’76
New York Times best-selling author of The Hot Zone, among other books, and expert on emerging viruses

Physics major Adele Myers ’21 has been awarded a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, which provides $7,500 a year for undergraduate education expenses to sophomores and juniors who intend to pursue careers in mathematics, natural sciences or engineering. Working with physicist Greg Spriggs at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Myers discovered evidence of a phenomenon called water entrainment in nuclear blasts over water.

Recent graduate Sal Wanying Fu ’19 has received a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, a $90,000 merit-based grant for outstanding immigrants and children of immigrants who are pursuing graduate school in the United States. A current astrophysics doctoral student at University of California, Berkeley, Fu is among 30 students selected from a pool of more than 2,000 applicants. She is the fourth Pomona graduate to join the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows.

Franco Liu ’20 has been awarded a Downing Scholarship to study linguistics at the University of Cambridge for 2020-21. An international student from China, Liu was hooked on the discipline after taking an introductory course with Professor Michael Diercks during his first year of college. The award will cover Liu’s tuition, fees, living expenses and round-trip travel, as well as a stipend for books, local travel and personal expenses.

Yannai Kashtan ’20 became the first Pomona student and the first chemistry student to win a prestigious Knight-Hennessy scholarship, which provides a full ride to Stanford University to pursue any graduate program of his choosing. The award criteria for winners include “rebellious minds and independent spirits” and “future global leaders.” He plans to study photoelectrochemical CO2 reduction with groups working on integrated artificial photosynthesis modules.

During the pandemic, the Philosophy, Politics and Economics Program, known on campus as PPE, saw its initials co-opted in the national media as the pandemic focused public attention on shortages of personal protective equipment. So, when Professor Eleanor Brown ’75, chair of the program, was casting about for some memento to send to the graduating PPE seniors, she hit upon the idea of co-opting a piece of personal protective equipment “to proclaim the essential nature of this quintessential liberal arts degree.” Modeling the PPE’s new PPE in the photo above is Rachel Oda ’20.

Even in the midst of a global health crisis, the work of the admissions office has gone on with the selection of the new Pomona College Class of 2024. Here are a few facts about the new class of Sagehens:

745 were offered admission.

49 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico, are represented.

45 other countries were home to new admits.

52% of the class are female and 48% male.

58.8% are domestic students of color.

20.7% of the class will be first-generation college students.

26 transfer students were admitted.

4 military veterans were admitted, representing the Army, Marine Corps and Navy.

90% are in the top 10% of their class.

6 are graduates of the Pomona Academy for Youth Success (PAYS).

16 admitted students were matched through Pomona’s partnership with QuestBridge.

20 were admitted through the Posse Foundation.

President G. Gabrielle Starr has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences joining a new class of members recognized for outstanding achievements in academia, the arts, business, government and public affairs.

Starr is a highly regarded scholar of English literature whose work reaches into neuroscience and the arts. Her research looks closely at the brain, through the use of fMRI, to help get to the heart of how people respond to paintings, music and other forms of art. She is a national voice on access to college for students of all backgrounds, the future of higher education, women in leadership and the importance of the arts. She took office as the 10th president of Pomona College in 2017.

The Academy was chartered in 1780 to “cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people.” Academy members are elected on the basis of their leadership in academics, the arts, business or public affairs and have ranged from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to such 20th-century luminaries as Margaret Mead, Martin Luther King Jr. and Akira Kurosawa.

For 2020, the Academy elected 276 new members. In addition to Starr, the group includes singer Joan C. Baez, former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., author Ann Patchett, poet and former Pomona College professor Claudia Rankine, among others.

Starr joins a number of exemplary Pomona alumni and former faculty in the AAAS, including scientists Jennifer Doudna ’85, J. Andrew McCammon ’69 and Tom Pollard ’64; author Louis Menand ’73; art historian Ingrid Rowland ’74; artist James Turrell ’65; journalist Joe Palca ’74; and genomic biologist Sarah Elgin ’67.

The Academy is led by Pomona College President Emeritus David Oxtoby, who was inducted into the Academy in 2012 and was named its president in 2018. He served as president of Pomona College from 2003 until 2017.

Starr becomes the third Pomona College president to join the Academy. David Alexander, who served as president of Pomona from 1969 to 1991, was inducted into the Academy in 2006.

At a ceremony in Washington, D.C., in November, Lucas Carmel ’19 was honored as one of 10 students from across the country on the “All In” Campus Democracy Challenge Student Honor Role. The award is in recognition of his leadership last year in a nonpartisan voter participation drive on Pomona College’s campus.

Carmel, along with Michaela Shelton ’21, led efforts to get out the vote at Pomona. Their work paid off with voter turnout among Pomona College students almost tripling from the 2014 to 2018 midterm elections, according to a report released Sept. 20 by the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement (NSLVE). In 2018, 50.4% of Pomona College students voted compared to 17.4% in 2014.

A group of students at Pomona College led by Carmel and Shelton began to organize a nonpartisan effort to get out the vote in the summer of 2018. That’s when the group joined the “All In” Campus Democracy Challenge, a national awards program that encourages colleges and universities to increase student voting rates.

“So many people worked to promote voting on campus last fall, and today we get to see proof of just how successful that effort was,” Carmel said in September when the results were announced. “I think Pomona’s status as a leader in college voting has been cemented. The challenge now becomes: How do we maintain and continue to promote voter engagement on campus?”

Carmel, who graduated last May, recently launched Vote for Astra, his organization dedicated to making it easier for college students to vote.

Sometime this fall, the Pomona College Museum of Art will cease to exist, and the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College will be born in its beautiful new quarters on the opposite corner of the intersection of College and Second. To prepare for that change, for the past few months, the museum’s associate director and registrar, Steve Comba, has been overseeing the effort to inventory, pack and safely move approximately 15,000 valuable and often fragile art objects from the museum’s old storage into the new. Already in their new home are the artifacts of the museum’s Native American collection, previously stored in the basement of Bridges Auditorium and brought out mainly for visiting schoolchildren.