Articles Written By: emae2021@pomona.edu

The Summer of Turrell

June 26, 2013 by Suzanne Muchnic Comments Off

James Turrell’s The Light Inside, created with neon and ambient light, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. © James Turrell

The master of light and space delivered the remark with a smile. “I have a business of selling blue sky and colored air,” James Turrell ’65 told a group of arts reporters after they had previewed his long-awaited retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But if he counts exhibitions as sales, business is extraordinarily good this year. While Dividing the Light, Turrell’s Skyspace at Pomona College, continues to attract students, alumni and visitors to Draper Courtyard, celebrations of his work are popping up from coast to coast.

The centerpiece of the “Turrell festival,” as LACMA director Michael Govan calls it, is a trio of major museum exhibitions in Los Angeles, Houston and New York. LACMA’s James Turrell: A Retrospective is a five-decade survey, composed of 56 works, including sculptures, prints, drawings, watercolors, photographs and installations. “This is the largest exhibition of works by this artist assembled anywhere at any time,” Govan says. And it will have an unusually long, 10-month run (ending April 6, 2014), so that the expected thousands of visitors can experience the artist’s mind-bending installations as he wishes—slowly, silently, and singly or in small groups. As the museum director reminds guests, “The slower you go, the more you get.”

Rendering by Andreas Tjeldflaat. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

One large section of the show is devoted to Turrell’s Roden Crater project, which began to take shape in 1977 when the Dia Art Foundation provided funds for the artist to buy a dormant volcano near Arizona’s Painted Desert. With a goal of transforming the crater into an observatory of celestial events and perceptual phenomena, he intended to complete the job around 1990. Challenges of fundraising, engineering and construction have repeatedly extended the project. Now Turrell jokes, “I have said I would finish in the year 2000 and I will stick with that.” He likens himself to a graduate student who can’t seem to complete a doctoral thesis. But his biggest obstacle is the need for an unspecified amount of money, which he concedes is in “the millions.”

Despite persistent delays with Turrell’s magnum opus, the museum exhibitions attest to his productivity in other areas. Over the years, he has made a wide variety of drawings, prints and sculptural pieces related to the crater, as well as installations including floating volumes of projected light, environments that heighten perceptual awareness, and spatially disorienting Ganzfelds. None of his architectural Skyspaces are at the museums because of the difficulty of cutting holes in their walls and ceilings, but he has completed 82 of these structures, each tailored to a specific site. He has also developed Perceptual Cells, designed for one or two people to recline while watching a constantly changing program of phased and strobed light. In the cell at LACMA, called Light Reignfall, a single viewer lies on a narrow bed that slides into a closed chamber.

In Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts has devoted a huge portion of its gallery space to James Turrell: The Light Inside (through Septembber 22). Named for the subterranean installation that connects the museum’s two buildings under a street, the show is entirely drawn from the MFAH’s extensive collection. The museum acquired its first Turrells in the mid-1990s and went on to amass a holding that spans the artist’s career. While some works in the exhibition are familiar to the museum’s core audience, Tycho, a 1967 double-projection, is making its public debut. So is Aurora B, a 2010-11 piece from Turrell’s Tall Glass series, in which LED light is programmed to produce subtle shifts of color on rectangular panels of etched glass over long periods of time.

In New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim has turned its spectacular rotunda into a Turrell. Called Aten Reign (and scheduled to remain in place until September 25), the installation is billed as “one of the most dramatic transformations of the museum ever conceived.” Turrell has converted the soaring central space of the Frank Lloyd Wright building into an enormous cylindrical volume of fluctuating light, both natural and artificial. Instead of opening to the sky, Skyspace-style, Aten Reign surrounds visitors with concentric lines of glowing color, which lead to the glass-covered oculus at the apex of the historic structure. Adjacent galleries offer more conventional works by Turrell as a complement to the dramatic installation.

The three exhibitions evolved from tentative plans for a traveling retrospective, says Govan, a long-time Turrell associate and former director of the Dia Art Foundation. Leaders of the Los Angeles and Houston museums began a conversation that expanded to include the Guggenheim. “But then we realized that James Turrell exhibitions don’t travel in the typical way because you end up building most of the works on site,” Govan says. The solution was “to do three shows all at once, but with different content.”

Serious Turrellians must see all three, of course. But that isn’t all. Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery has opened a new space at 1201 S. La Brea Ave. in Los Angeles, with Turrell’s assistance. The inaugural show of his work has closed, but he has a continuing presence in the gallery’s lighting and a Skyspace, furnished with comfortable chairs. And in Las Vegas, he has designed an installation for The Shops at Crystals, a high-end fashion center that’s encased in an explosive arrangement of angular walls. Turrell’s outdoor spectacle of changing colored light is attuned to the arrivals and departures of trains at the adjacent monorail station.

Govan calls the Los Angeles museum’s show “a little bit of a homecoming” for “a local boy gone good.” Turrell, who was born in L.A. and grew up in Pasadena, is pleased that his work has settled into an exceptionally large chunk of LACMA’s real estate—an entire floor of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and about a third of the Resnick Pavilion—for an unusually long time. But when reporters and critics question him about his artistic vision, he gets back to his favorite subject: human perception.

“I am very interested in how we perceive because that is how we construct the reality in which we live,” he says. “We all have perception that we have learned. I like to tweak that a little bit, or push you on that. In the Skyspaces, we all know that the sky is blue. We just don’t realize that we give the sky its blueness. We are not very well aware of how much we are part of the making of what we perceive. That’s what I enjoy giving to you. Basically, I have always thought that I use the material, light, to give you perception.”

This summer three major American museums are presenting exhibitions highlighting the achievements of James Turrell ‘65, best known for his large-scale light installations.

LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART
James Turrell: A Retrospective
Through April 6, 2014
The first major Turrell retrospective survey gathers approximately 50 works spanning nearly five decades, including his early geometric light projections, prints and drawings, installations exploring sensory deprivation and seemingly unmodulated fields of colored light, and recent two-dimensional holograms. A section is also devoted to Turrell’s masterwork in process, Roden Crater. www.lacma.org

THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON
James Turrell: The Light Inside
Through Sept. 22, 2013
Titled after the museum’s iconic Turrell permanent installation The Light Inside (1999), and centered on the collection of additional work by the artist at the MFAH, the Houston exhibition makes several of the artist’s installations accessible to the public for the first time. www.mfah.org

SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
James Turrell
Through Sept. 25, 2013, Turrell’s first exhibition in a New York museum since 1980 focuses on the artist’s explorations of perception, light, color and space, with a special focus on the role of site-specificity in his practice. At its core is a major new project that recasts the Guggenheim rotunda as an enormous volume filled with shifting natural and artificial light. www.guggenheim.org

Hollywood and the White House

June 26, 2013 by Sneha Abraham Comments Off

In his new book, The Leading Man: Hollywood and the Presidential Image, historian Burton Peretti ’82 explores how Tinseltown and the U.S. presidency are sometimes strange, sometimes highly compatible bedfellows that build a relationship based on mass communication.

“It may seem surprising to claim that a president or other politician could cross over to the fantasy world of the movies, but it has happened,” Peretti writes in his introduction. “Such transformations have, in fact, been a major development in American political history.”

So did Hollywood seek out presidents or did presidents seek out Hollywood? Peretti says the answer is yes and yes. The attraction was mutual. “Presidents were fascinated by the cultural power wielded by the movies, while moviemakers were drawn to the dramatic realm of power in the real world,” says Peretti.

With most of his work focusing on 20th century politics, culture and music, Peretti’s previous books include Lift Every Voice: the History of African American Music and Jazz in American Culture. After writing Nightclub City: Politics and Amusement in Manhattan, looking at how local politicians became enamored with the city’s 1920s nightlife, he was asked to follow up with a book on American culture since 1945. Peretti instead found himself drawn even prior to that era, and specifically to the relationship between show business and the White House.

Peretti traces the beginning of the romance to the 1920s, when presidents were as star-struck as ordinary Americans, and movie stars and studios sought out appearances at the side of the executive-in-chief and to influence legislation favorable to Tinseltown on issues such as tax rates and antitrust regulation. It was the beginning of a friendship with benefits.

Some of those benefits to presidents were studio-style advice and movie review-like critiques. In the early days of television, Presidents Hoover, Truman and Eisenhower received letters criticizing their on-camera styles. To polish up, Eisenhower recruited movie actor Robert Montgomery as a consultant who changed the president’s posture, wardrobe, gestures and pace ofspeaking, Peretti says.

Peretti considers John F. Kennedy the paragon, the real golden boy, burnished in part by his father’s brief stint as a Hollywood producer and his contacts in the industry. “Kennedy drew on his experience socializing in Hollywood to look, dress and move like a movie idol. He carefully posed for photos and worked at displaying a casual style at televised press conferences,” says Peretti.

He cites the recollection of Princess Grace of Monaco, the former film star Grace Kelly, after Kennedy’s assassination: “He was almost too good to be true—he was just like the All-American boy, wasn’t he? Handsome, a fighter, witty, full of charm.”

But not everyone was quite as taken with him. Losing in 1960, Richard Nixon found Kennedy’s resemblance to and reception as a movie star was a thorn in his side, one that fed Nixon’s obsession with his own portrayal and led to him hiring numerous media consultants. “He was more concerned about his image than any other president, but it did him little good,” says Peretti, a former professor at Western Connecticut State University, soon to start a new role as dean of liberal arts at Northern Virginia Community College’s Annandale campus.

If Kennedy is the best and most glamorous pick and Nixon the worst, Ronald Reagan might be the most obvious. Thirty years spent in TV and film cultivated Reagan’s effortless mien in front of cameras, and perhaps buffed his quick wit. Like Kennedy, Reagan understood that success as a mass media politician required a movie-star-like touch, Peretti says.

Fast-forward to the 21st century, where President Obama’s approach to Hollywood is a bit more complicated. In both elections President Obama garnered glitterati show-biz supporters like Béyonce, Scarlett Johansson and studio executive Jeffrey Katzenberg. Actor Kal Penn was appointed as associate director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. But when it comes to style, Peretti says Obama has been a somewhat ambiguous case in terms of Hollywood influence.

“In 2008 [Obama] seemed to channel the public’s mistrust of blatant media manipulation by the president, in the wake of George W. Bush’s posturing as a Navy flyboy and ideal commander-in-chief. Obama balanced his charisma before audiences with a diffident speaking style that seemed to reject Hollywood effects.”

However, if Obama is distancing himself, Peretti notes that—on the other side of the White House bed—First Lady Michelle Obama has embraced a celebrity persona in many ways, including appearances on the Oscars and the cover of Vogue.

Currently, and even more so in the future, Peretti sees less cinematic grandeur and more scrutiny of stars and presidents. Twentyfour- hour news cycles and social media reveal public figures as human, fallible and could possibly make presidents seem insignificant, he says. But the interplay between cinema and the highest office in the land still retains some of its magic. And, Peretti argues, the subject tells us a lot about who we are as a people, showing us “how we balance our civic life with a rich and disruptive dream life, epitomized by the movies.”

What We Gave the Game

June 26, 2013 by various Comments Off

So what if a century has passed since Pomona College sent a player to the majors? Sagehens have left their tracks on the national pastime in all sorts of surprising ways, racking up win after win for the liberal arts.

1) Computer baseball: The first interactive baseball computer game was born in Mudd-Blaisdell. Here’s how a would-be playwright and a ballet dancer became video game pioneers.

2) The Ultimate Baseball Roadtrip: Over 16 years, Mike Luery ’77 and his son visited ever Major League ballpark in North America, somehow surviving those tense teen years.

3) The Nation’s Smartest Stadium Restaurant: With his acclaimed restaurant in the shadow of Boston’s Fenway Park, Garrett Harker ’89 offers a brainy beacon amid a sea of beer-soaked sports bars.

4) Reassuring Research: The big leagues owe a debt of gratitute to Professor Gary Smith for such scholarly papers as “The Baseball Hall of Fame is Not the Kiss of Death.”

5) Big-League Books: Sagehen wordsmiths such as Professor Jonathan Lethem contribute more than their share to the ever-growing trove of baseball literature.

6) Baseball Worldwide: From Brussels to Tel Avis to Taipei, Sagehens play an outside role in helping to spread baseball fever beyond the bounds of North America.

7) Goofball Classic: A quarter century after its release, the movie Major League by David Ward ’67 has only grown in its appeal as baseball fans’ favorite funny flick.

A Different Groove

June 26, 2013 by Rachel Stewart Johnson '96 Comments Off

Tae Phoenix ’05

Seattle singer and songwriter Tae Phoenix ’05 long dreamed of pursuing a career in music. For years she hesitated, put off by the insidious attitudes of industry insiders. “A lot of people said, ‘God I love your voice; you’re such a great musician. Get your nose fixed and lose 20 pounds and we’ll talk.’”

It wasn’t until her late 20s that she decided to quit her corporate job and pursue music full time. Since the release last year of her debut “handcrafted acoustic pop” album, Rise, Phoenix has enjoyed a lengthy string of weekends booked with live performances. She’s happy doing things her own way. “In terms of being able to make the art you want to make—get it out there the way you want to—and really sell your product and sell yourself as opposed to what a label wants to turn you into, it’s fantastic, and I would not ever go back to the way things were,” says Phoenix, who was known as Teresa Valdez-Klein during her time at Pomona.

The old industry model saw artists pursue a contract with a record label. Now, the landscape includes more opportunities to find an audience. The catch? Few are lucrative. Artists can self-finance an album—what Phoenix dubbed a “musical calling card.” They can put their music on YouTube. They can build up a fan base with live gigs. They can sell music via websites and apps such as CDBaby and iTunes, often one 99-cent single at a time. One thing hasn’t changed: the lifestyle requires grit.

“There’s a lot of rejection, there’s a lot of people who take more than they give, there’s a lot of emotional struggle,” Phoenix says. “Carving your own path, no matter what it is that you’re doing—if you’re trying to establish a new industry, if you’re trying to start a new company, if you’re trying to do anything outside of the prescribed formula that we’re given for life—can be really brutal. You fail more, you hurt more, you bleed more, you get your heart broken more.”

Allison Tartalia ’96

Allison Tartalia ’96 hasn’t followed formula. A theatre major, she left Pomona believing she would pursue a career on the stage. It was work in musical theatre that led her to bridge two longtime interests. The New York singer and songwriter has never pursued a career outside the arts, instead innovating ways to make a living with what she termed a “freelance livelihood.”

She maintains a studio of piano students and licenses a curriculum to teach music classes to young children. She was nominated for a regional Emmy award in 2010 for her musical contribution to a PBS documentary and released Sweet and Vicious, a short album, the following year. She performs regularly, including as part of an ensemble in a Joni Mitchell tribute show.

“It used to be that what you hoped to get was a label deal,” says Tartalia. “Now to some degree it’s not as necessary because you have more direct access to audiences than you did 20 years ago. There’s not necessarily enough financial benefit to sacrificing what you have to sacrifice to justify signing with a label.”

Jason Mandell ’01 did sign an old-fashioned deal. He met with early success in his music career, while still on campus working toward a degree in English. His Claremont band, Think of England, included then-Dean of Campus Life Matt Taylor on the drums. The group first won the nationwide Pantene Pro-Voice contest and then gained national interest by opening for pop star Jewel and others. The attention Mandell garnered helped lead him and a later partner to ink a deal known as a publishing contract, which provided funds to support future songwriting. He had enough income to focus exclusively on creating music for a year.

It was a rare opportunity for any artist. “There was some really awesome stuff happening right out of the gate,” Mandell recalls. But then, the realities of a cutthroat business meant that his subsequent work couldn’t gain a lasting foothold. The company that signed him never recouped its expenses with sales of his work—and still holds the rights to any gains from that music. Mandell and his partner split. He drifted into work with new collaborators, and today performs with the Los Angeles country-folk band The Coals, which releases its album A Happy Animal this summer.

Mandell is uncertain that the industry’s metamorphosis has enriched its output. “I’m not sure that the alleged democratization of music is yielding superior product. I think the opposite,” he says. The audience has changed as well. “The attention span is certainly decreasing. I’m not sure that benefits anybody.”

Mandell laughs, noting that perhaps he sounds like a “curmudgeon” at this point in his career. He remembers a different era. “No one buys music,” he says. “When I grew up, there were two ways to listen to music. You happen to hear it on the radio or you buy it. That’s certainly not the case anymore.”

Mandell pointed to a goal for musicians today: licensing deals. Placing one’s work in film, television and other media can be a boon. His “I Wanted a Lover, I Needed a Friend” appears in the video game Silent Hill: Downpour. Tartalia’s “Ran” was used in the reality television show Dance Moms. Although these steps raise audience interest, income can still be elusive. Mandell’s tune is controlled by his old label. Tartalia receives a respectable 63 cents on the dollar for sales of her single on iTunes, but earns only fractions of a cent from websites like Spotify when fans stream her music from there.

After years of focus on his music career, Mandell decided to pursue what he calls “a proper day job” and now serves as director of public affairs for the United Way of Greater Los Angeles. “Looking back, the truth is I’ve had a lot of experiences that I feel really fortunate to have had and maybe never really expected to have,” he says. “You know it’s fickle and you know it’s difficult. I enjoy it more now because I expect even less of it, financially speaking. It’s really freeing.”

The Summer of Turrell

June 24, 2013 by Suzanne Muchnic Comments Off

Rendering by Andreas Tjeldflaat. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Turrell traces his interest in light to an art history class at Pomona, where he began to see the beam of light emitted by a slide projector as something to look at, not just a means of illuminating something else. As his work evolved, light became his primary material and a path to perceptual discovery. The retrospective follows his career from early light projections in darkened rooms to holograms and “immersive environments” that surround viewers with other-worldly orchestrations of colored light and deceptive space.One large section of the show is devoted to Turrell’s Roden Crater project, which began to take shape in 1977 when the Dia Art Foundation provided funds for the artist to buy a dormant volcano near Arizona’s Painted Desert. With a goal of transforming the crater into an observatory of celestial events and perceptual phenomena, he intended to complete the job around 1990. Challenges of fundraising, engineering and construction have repeatedly extended the project. Now Turrell jokes, “I have said I would finish in the year 2000 and I will stick with that.” He likens himself to a graduate student who can’t seem to complete a doctoral thesis. But his biggest obstacle is the need for an unspecified amount of money, which he concedes is in “the millions.”

This summer three major American museums are presenting exhibitions highlighting the achievements of James Turrell ‘65, best known for his large-scale light installations.

THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON
James Turrell: The Light Inside
Through Sept. 22, 2013
Titled after the museum’s iconic Turrell permanent installation The Light Inside (1999), and centered on the collection of additional work by the artist at the MFAH, the Houston exhibition makes several of the artist’s installations accessible to the public for the first time. www.mfah.org

SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
James Turrell
Through Sept. 25, 2013 Turrell’s first exhibition in a New York museum since 1980 focuses
on the artist’s explorations of perception, light, color and space, with a special focus on the role of site-specificity in his practice. At its core is a major new project that recasts the Guggenheim rotunda as an enormous volume filled with shifting natural and artificial light. www.guggenheim.org

Rock ‘n’ Roll Rulers

June 20, 2013 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Isolated golden crown Coolest name for a college band: The Inland Emperors. The group formed last fall, and Wes Haas ’15 and Lee Owens-Oas ’15 came up with the moniker during their Physics with Music class. As Haas explains, they were talking about how they now live in the Inland Empire and wondering whether anyone’s ever thought whether “there’s an emperor of the place” and—voilà—the band, which includes three more Sagehens, had its name. What do they play? “Loud rock music,” says Haas. Gigs so far have mostly been on campus, but with a name like that, we’re sure their reign will someday reach all the way to Riverside.

How to Put the Slam in Pomona Poetry

March 28, 2013 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

Since his first poetry slam a year ago, Frank Sanchez ’13 has been leading a crusade to bring the high-octane competitions to Pomona. Audience members judge the poet-performers, so connecting with the crowd is key, says Sanchez, who takes us on his path to becoming a poetry promoter.

1) DISCOVER spoken word poetry in eighth grade while listening to the radio. Connect to poet Beau Sia’s humor and conversational style. Put aside poetry (temporarily) for music. Play piano, drums, guitar, and write punk and pop songs. Leave Austin for Pomona and a major in gender and women’s studies. Perform on campus in band called Awarewolves.

2) CHECK OUT the performances at a café in L.A.’s Little Tokyo. Embrace poet Edren Sumagaysay’s challenge to the audience to write every day. Pound out your very first poem that night. Know you’ve found your voice.

3) TAKE CLASSES in creative writing and poetry. Focus on spoken word and slam poetry. Write about family, home and childhood. Attend first slam poetry contest in Austin during winter break. Get plucked from audience as a judge. Return the following week as a performer. Realize you’re hooked.

4) LAUNCH a campaign to bring slam poetry to Claremont. Enlist novice poets from Pomona to compete in national college contest. Take some solace that you don’t finish dead last. Decide your senior thesis is going to be about slam poetry and the ways it engages people. Teach a poetry class to high school students over the summer.

5) COME FULL CIRCLE. Attend a book signing by Beau Sia. Win your first poetry slam back home in Austin on break. Organize writing workshops, open mics and performances by slam poets. Bring together poets, dancers, and other artists from across campus for your big spring event. Recruit a team to compete at the 2013 nationals. Get ready to graduate. Plan to keep on slamming.

Quick Looks

March 28, 2013 by staff Comments Off

The second floor of Millikan Laboratory is home to “Seeing Symmetry” an exhibition of mathematical art by Frank Farris ’77 that will be on display until summer. Farris, a math professor at Santa Clara University, says his interest in the intersection of art and mathematics began at Pomona. More recently Farris reconnected with Pomona people at a national conference, leading to the on-campus exhibition.

Claudia Rankine, the Henry G. Lee Professor of English, has been elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, a distinguished position that in the past has been held by such poets as W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich. At Pomona since 2006, Rankine is the author of four collections of poetry: Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Plot, The End of the Alphabet and Nothing in Nature is Private.

Bertil Lindblad ’78, leaving his role as director of the UNAIDS New York office, is the College’s new senior advisor for international initiatives, bringing more than 30 years of experience in large and complex organizations focused on international cooperation and development. In the newly created position, Lindblad will work to coordinate and expand Pomona’s global connections and international activities through collaborative relationships.

The latest translation project by Professor of Chinese Allan Barr has brought him into the world of Chinese pop culture, political criticism and blogging. This Generation: Dispatches from China’s Most Popular Literary Star (and Race Car Driver) is a collection of blog posts by Han Han, a national celebrity in China who is both controversial and celebrated as a blogger, race-car driver and best-selling author.

Erica Flapan, the Lingurn H. Burkhead Professor of Mathematics, has been selected as one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society, which recognizes “members who have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication and utilization of mathematics.” She has been at Pomona since 1986.

Summer Success

March 28, 2013 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

Launched in 2011, Pomona College’s summer internship program has already funded 33 students in full-time domestic and international internships, including stints at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, a post-production studio in Los Angeles and an economic development group in New York.

Summer internships are rooted in the Pomona College Internship Program (PCIP), which started in 1976 and continues today, with about 80 students working as part-time interns each semester in Claremont, Pomona and the Los Angeles area. With PCIP’s success came a push for intensive, full-time working experiences, where students could spend up to 10 weeks in the summer exploring possible career paths, reaffirming areas of interests or finding new ones.

For Peter Pellitier ’14, an internship at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont last summer gave him a firsthand look at graduate level research, while Mitsuko Yabe ’14 says her experience as a veterinary assistant at an animal hospital in New York confirmed her passion for veterinary medicine.

Along with summer research, internships have become an increasingly important part of a college education. ”It used to be a college degree was the mode of access to the employment market,” says Mary Raymond, director of the Career Development Office (CDO).

Nowadays “a student can have a great transcript, but they have to have developed their resumes too.” Internships, adds Raymond, also can give students an edge when applying to graduate school and for competitive fellowships and scholarships. The CDO works closely with students to prepare them for the workplace, says internship coordinator Marcela Rojas, who helps them navigate the application process and interviews with prospective employers. It’s up to the student, however, to find an internship and to present a budget to the selection committee. “We want them to pursue their interests and understand what research is involved when finding an opportunity, very much like the job market,” says Raymond. “In a way, we see gaining those practical skills as part of the academic experience here.”

For many Pomona students, work is a necessity, so taking advantage of unpaid or low-paying internships is not always possible.To level the playing field, the College pays hourly wages for PCIP programs and provides stipends of $4,000 to $5,000 to cover living expenses and travel in the summer, funded primarily by gifts from alumni, parents and foundations. In December, the Parents Fund announced a $100,000 challenge, with gifts directed to internships matched one to one by an anonymous donor.

With more applicants for summer internships than available funding, Raymond hopes the program will continue to grow so that all interested students will have a chance to participate. “We want to encourage intellectual curiosity, and that can be satisfied in a number of ways,” she says. “Students understand the formula for getting into college and doing well academically. But they’re also looking for the formula for happy, successful and personally rewarding lives. Where do you go to find out what the script is for that? It can only come from your own experience.”

History on the Move

March 28, 2013 by Sam McLaughlin ’16 Comments Off

In a 12-hour-long overnight operation, Replica House this fall was safely relocated to a new site off campus. Lengthy as it was, the transport was brief compared to the two-year planning and permitting process that preceded it. “There were no hiccups or hitches at all,” says Bob Robinson, director of the Office of Facilities and Campus Services, of the move.

The house was built in the 1930s as a two-thirds-scale replica of the downtown Pomona cottage where the College held its first classes in 1887. Originally intended to hold Pomona memorabilia, the replica for a time housed the KSPC radio station and was relocated in the ’60s to land farther into the interior of campus, next to Brackett Observatory.

That land is now the construction site for the new Studio Art Center, and so the cottage in November was moved to private land near the Claremont Hills Wilderness Park. Though under private ownership, the house is easily visible from the park entrance, and Robinson says there will be a plaque to commemorate the building’s heritage.

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