There are seemingly endless tips for time management, but Vicky-Marie Addo-Ashong ’20 and Andrew Phillips ’19 seem to have found a novel one.
They leave themselves practically no free time to manage.
The two accomplished Pomona College students are both two-sport athletes—not to mention captains of both of their teams.
“I’ve never considered myself a person who likes to have a lot of free time. If I do, I just sleep a lot,” says Addo-Ashong, a track and field athlete who holds the Pomona-Pitzer record in the triple jump but says her true love is volleyball.
Phillips finished his career as a defensive back on the football team with a second consecutive win over Claremont-Mudd-Scripps in the Sixth Street Rivalry game last fall and is a senior utility player for the baseball team this spring. What’s more, he’s a premed student who already scored well on the MCAT after taking the seven-and-a-half-hour test last August—the day before he arrived on campus for football camp.
“My time management has definitely improved over the course of my college career,” says Phillips, suggesting it hasn’t always come naturally. “There are always times where you are like, ‘Aw, I should have done something productive there.’”
Full Calendars
Addo-Ashong, a public policy analysis major and mathematics minor from suburban Washington, D.C., is very active on campus. She’s a campus tour guide—“I love being at Pomona, and I love being able to show it to other people,” she says—a member of the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, and one of five students on the President’s Advisory Committee on Sexual Violence Intervention and Prevention, which is in its first full year. “That’s been really interesting and important. Being part of that process, I’ve found that to be something I care about a lot,” she says.
Addo-Ashong also works as a research assistant to her academic advisor, Pierre Englebert, professor of international relations and politics. And last year, she was one of the leaders of a sponsor group and commissioner of sports for the Associated Students of Pomona College.
Need a nap yet?
Phillips is also involved in the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee and president of a campus club, the Claremont chapter of Health Guardians of America, a group working to eliminate obesity on college campuses.
What’s more, Phillips has an added degree of difficulty in managing two sports as a neuroscience major preparing to apply for med school. That’s because lab classes—a crucial part of his coursework—often don’t end until after practice begins.
“When I was getting recruited, the Division I schools said you have to do econ or history or something like that; basically, you couldn’t take labs,” Phillips says. “So that was part of why D-III. The coaches are really understanding about labs and the importance of academics. Also, the two-sport thing, that’s something special about D-III, for sure.”
This spring, Phillips has a genes and behavior lab on Tuesdays that starts at 1:30 p.m. and gets out around 4, but practice starts at 3:15. Usually that means putting in extra work before practice or staying late, taking extra batting practice or such. Sometimes, the conflicts are more extreme.
“My junior year, I had a biochemistry lab, which is the lab that takes the most time, I think. I took that during football season, and so I remember a couple of practices where I’d literally be in lab until 6 p.m., and the coaches didn’t get mad or anything.”
With med school in mind, Phillips also has made use of his summers and breaks. He trained as an emergency medical technician after his first year at Pomona and shadowed emergency room doctors at hospitals in Torrance and San Pedro after his sophomore year, along with working in a research lab at Caltech. Last summer, he also worked as an emergency department scribe at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, taking medical notes on a laptop as doctors and nurses treated patients. He has continued that work over college breaks. Phillips is considering orthopedics as a specialty partly because of his interest in sports, but the adrenaline of the emergency room also has appeal.
“I enjoyed that—the idea that you didn’t know exactly what was coming in,” he says. “The pressure situation.”
Being a Captain
Team captains, often three or four players who share the role, are sometimes chosen by a vote of teammates and sometimes by coaches. They are leaders on and off the field of competition, counselors for teammates and go-betweens with coaches.
Being a captain “has taught me a lot about understanding where my teammates are at, where my coaches are at, how to navigate both of those and act on the interests of my teammates with my coaches and discuss things,” says Addo-Ashong. “I think it’s being able to balance the interests of the people I’m working for and working with.”
Last summer, she interned at Public Citizen, a consumer rights advocacy group in Washington, D.C., in the Global Trade Watch division. She envisions returning to Washington after graduation to work for a couple of years in a field adjacent to politics or public service before likely returning to graduate school.
“I have a broad range of interests, and I’m not really sure what I’ll end up doing,” she says. “Everything from country development to justice policy interests me, so I just plan on seeing where life takes me.”
First, with one volleyball season and most of two track seasons to go, she has a goal: After finishing 20th in the triple jump at the NCAA Division III track and field championships last year, she hopes to make the top eight to become an All-American before she’s done. Addo-Ashong also is a standout in the 100-meter hurdles, recording the second-fastest time in the nation up to that point this season at a March meet.
Phillips will continue scribing after graduation while applying to enter med school in 2020, and he envisions taking the skills he learned on the field and in locker rooms into his professional life.
“For me, one thing I’ve needed to work on and develop is having the tough conversations with people you’re close with. All my best friends play on those sports teams, so having to talk about why they shouldn’t quit or why they’re not playing right now, those have been kind of tough,” he says.
“I would say that’s been a difficult part for me. And that’s something that as a doctor you have to have—tough conversations. That’s a really helpful skill, for sure.”
Over the past year and a half, a strange, disconnected structure has arisen at the center of what was once a remote parking lot on Pomona’s South Campus. Its concrete walls enclose nothing. Odd slabs and pillars of concrete surround it in no discernable pattern, and yet it includes a number of striking architectural features, making it a puzzle for passersby. It may look pointless, but according to Brian Faber, the project manager overseeing the construction of Pomona’s new Benton Museum of Art, this odd assemblage of architectural details is an important part of Pomona’s building process—a mock-up where the structural elements of the Benton’s new home can be tested, evaluated and, if necessary, adjusted before they are set in stone, so to speak, in the new building.
A storyteller from childhood and now an all-grown-up author, Ali Standish ’10 is writing children’s and middle-grade books that are being noticed by children and critics alike.
Pomona College Magazine’s Sneha Abraham talked to Standish about inspiration, imagination, what’s an absolute must in children’s literature and more.
I’ve just been doing it for really as long as I can remember. Then one of my really good friends, an important person in my life, passed away in fall of my senior year. And a big part of coping with that for me was writing my first children’s lit manuscript. I wrote a manuscript that was a very boilerplate, poorly written fantasy novel. And I was able to submit that as my final project for Children’s Literature 101. So senior year was when I really edged over into writing children’s literature.
While Avis Hinkson was growing up in a Barbadian immigrant household in Brooklyn, she imagined a career in health care. Instead, her life’s work has been guiding college students, first as an admission officer, later as a director of advising and now as Pomona College’s dean of students. “I didn’t go to college thinking I would stay in college,” she says with a laugh. She tells students that “as a college student, you want to chart a career path, and I encourage you to do that. But I also encourage you to be open to the right and left turns that sometimes take place, because they can lead you to wonderful career spots that you couldn’t have possibly imagined.”
Absorb the lesson while growing up in a culturally rich neighborhood that education is the path to a better life. Watch your mother, a seamstress, graduate from college in her 50s after going to work as a teacher assistant.
Go along with a high school friend to meet a recruiter from Barnard College. Be impressed that the recruiter is African American, and with the help of financial aid (Barnard costs more than your father makes in a year’s work as a mason), become one of about 25 Black students in a class of 500.
Bump into Barnard student Vernā Myers on your way to the career center to pick a work-study job as a first-year student. Heed the advice of the future Netflix vice president when she suggests a job in the admissions office. Create Barnard’s first overnight-visit program for prospective students of color.
Listen to Barnard senior Marcia Sells (a future dean of students at Harvard Law School) when she encourages you to run for the student seat on the Board of Trustees. Take part in the decision that Barnard will remain a women’s college instead of merging with Columbia.
After graduation, become an admissions counselor at Bowdoin, establishing minority recruitment programs there. Decide on a career in higher ed instead of health care, later earning an M.A. in student personnel administration from Columbia University’s Teachers College and an Ed.D. from Penn.
Establish minority recruitment programs at Cornell before coming to Pomona in 1990 as associate dean of admissions. Contribute to Pomona’s minority recruitment plan before moving on to become director of minority recruitment at the University of Southern California.
As director of advising for more than 18,000 undergraduates in the College of Letters and Sciences of the University of California, Berkeley, get an eye-opening look at the bureaucracy of a large public university. While furloughed amid a California budget crisis, remember the allure of small liberal arts colleges.
Go home again and call your 96-year-old father to tell him you’ve been named as Barnard’s first African American dean of the college. Feel grateful that a man who felt most comfortable talking with the public safety officers and janitors when visiting campus lived to see it.
Go home again (again). Leave behind your newly renovated childhood home in Brooklyn and return to Pomona as you are drawn back to the campus where G. Gabrielle Starr has recently become Pomona’s 10th president, the first woman and first African American to lead the campus.
Discover that April Mayes ’94 is now a professor of history at Pomona, and Nate Kirtman III ’92 is on the Board of Trustees. (Both were student workers in admissions when you worked at the College before.) Know that the seeds you planted have helped make Pomona one of the most diverse private residential liberal arts colleges in the country.
The Brooklyn, New York, based indie rock band We Are Scientists—the creation of bassist Chris Cain ’99 and guitarist Keith Murray ’00, who’ve now been performing together for almost 20 years—released the group’s sixth full-length album last April from 100% Records—a new collection of original pop songs, including “One In, One Out” and “Heart Is a Weapon.”
The Blue Wave Starts with Me:
Business Chemistry:
Dark Knowledge
Sea Change:
Searching for My Heart:
No Hard Feelings
Summary Execution:
The Power of the Impossible:
Peregrinations:
Sara When She Chooses
The American Road Trip and American
San Antonio:
For each major play produced at the College, the Theatre Department has a promotional banner made to be hoisted above the entrance to Seaver Theatre for a few weeks prior to opening night. But where does that banner go once the play is over? That was what Suzanne Reed, the department’s costume shop manager, wondered—so she asked. The answer turned out to be: the trash can. So Reed outlined a recycling idea. What if she transformed each banner into tote bags for some of the play’s principals as a parting memento of their performance? And that’s just what she’s done following the last few plays, the most recent being last fall’s production of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector. To make the recycling process complete, the chain sewn into the bottom of the banner to give it weight is now returned to the banner company to be used again in a future banner.
In a rite of passage, first-year students at Pomona begin their lives on campus with a Critical Inquiry seminar. These seminars focus on developing writing skills as students collaborate with peers, professors and student mentors to refine their drafts. The familiar five-paragraph format and the strict word counts of admissions essays are left behind. Here’s a look at a few of the new courses offered last fall: