Alumni

Flocking Together

December 2, 2015 by Staff Comments Off

Members of the Alumni Association Board include: (from left, front row) Emma Fullem ’14, Jared Mathis ’94, LJ Kwak ’05, Onetta Brooks ’74,Cathie Moon Brown ’53 P’75, Kyle Hill ’09, (second row) Jahan Boulden PZ’07, Jon Siegel ’84, Guy Lohman ’71, (third row) Anne Bachman Thacher ’75 P’07, Diane Ung ’85, Mac Barnett ’04, Nico Kass ’16, Maggie Lemons ’17 (intern), Mary Raymond, (fourth row) Lisa Phelps ’79 P’12, (fifth row) Roger Reinke ’51 P’80 GP’14, Emma Marshall ’14, Jordan Pedraza ’09, Brenda Barnett ’92, Matt Thompson ’96, Professor Lisa Beckett, (sixth row) Ward Heneveld ’64 P’92, Craig Arteaga-Johnson ’96 and Taziwa Chanaiwa ’95 P’17. Not pictured are: Conor O’Rourke ’03 and Peggy Olson ’61.

The Alumni Association Board held its first meeting of the year, led by Alumni Association President Onetta Brooks ’74, on October 4. President Oxtoby shared an informal “State of the College” and members were joined by parent and student guests for the following committee meetings:

Athletic Affinity (alumni co-chair Jared Mathis ’94)
Alumni Career Services (alumni co-chair Matt Thompson ’96)
Young Alumni Engagement (alumni co-chair Emma Fullem ’14)
Giving/Service Days (alumni co-chair Lisa Phelps ’79 P’12)
Current Matters of Concern (alumni co-chair Cathie Brown ’53 P’75)

To nominate someone for the Alumni Association Board, email alumni@pomona.edu.

Winter Break Parties

Celebrate the new year with a Pomona College Winter Break Party, coming to a city near you January 2–15, 2016! Held while students are home for winter break, this Pomona College tradition is one of the best ways for alumni to connect with students in their hometowns and to meet fellow Sagehens living nearby.

2016 Winter Break Parties are currently being planned for Boston, Chicago, Kansas City (Missouri), Los Angeles, Menlo Park, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

Don’t miss out—check out our listings at pomona.edu/alumnievents for details and updates about the Winter Break Party nearest you.

4/7 Celebration of Impact

Civic-minded Sagehens: Make sure you are part of Pomona’s second Celebration of Sagehen Impact, scheduled for April 7 (yes, 4/7), 2016. Last year, more than 150 Pomona students and alumni flooded the College’s Alumni Facebook group and Instagram feeds with pledges, shout-outs and stories about the many ways Sagehens are “bearing our added riches” on campus, in our neighborhoods and around the globe. Organize with fellow Sagehens or find your own ways to contribute your time, talent or treasure to the causes that mean most to you. Our community will be ready to celebrate your good work on April 7.

Budenholzer Heads List for Hall of Fame

Mike Budenholzer poses with Coach Charles Katsiaficas.

Mike Budenholzer ’92 with Mens’ Basketball Coach Charles Katsiaficas.

National Basketball Association Coach of the Year Mike Budenholzer ’92 and former Athletic Director Curt Tong were among the honorees when the Pomona-Pitzer Hall of Fame inducted six new members this fall. Also honored during the 58th annual induction ceremony were Scott Coleman PO ’05 (soccer); Joy Haviland PZ ’03 (water polo, swimming); Kevin Hickey PO ’99 (baseball); Lucia Schmit PO ’03 (water polo, swimming). Budenholzer was inducted as an honorary member (basketball) and Tong was honored for his years of distinguished service as athletic director.

Want to keep up with our sports teams and engage with the Athletics community? Follow @Sagehens on Twitter and like “Pomona-Pitzer Sagehens” on Facebook.

Ladd Named Inspirational Young Alumna

Jessica Ladd ’08

Jessica Ladd ’08 has been selected as the recipient of the 2015 Inspirational Young Alumni Award. Ladd, who was featured in the summer 2015 issue of PCM, is the founder and CEO of Sexual Health Innovations (SHI), a non-profit dedicated to creating technology that advances sexual health and wellbeing in the United States. At SHI, she spearheaded the creation of the STD partner notification website So They Can Know, the STD test result delivery system Private Results, and the college sexual assault reporting system Callisto.

Before founding Sexual Health Innovations, Ladd worked in the White House Office of National AIDS Policy, as a Public Policy Associate at The AIDS Institute, and as a sexual health educator and researcher for a variety of organizations. She also co-founded The Social Innovation Lab in Baltimore and a chapter of FemSex at Pomona College. Ladd has also recently been recognized as a Fearless Changemaker by the Case Foundation, an Emerging Innovator by Ashoka and American Express, and as the Civic Hacker of the Year by Baltimore Innovation Week.

Video Corner

Daring Minds Talks

Tune in to a series of thought-provoking online lectures withmembers of our alumni community, including James Turrell ’65, EdKrupp ’66, Mary Schmich ’75, Bill Keller ’70 and Gabe London ’00. To find the Daring Minds playlist, and for more inspirational speakers and enriching stories from campus, visit youtube.com/pomonacollege and click “Playlists.”

Travel/Study

From Angles to Angels: The Christianization of Barbarian England

A green pasture with a stone wall

With History Professor Ken Wolf
May 18–29, 2016

The eighth in a series of alumni walking trips with a medieval theme, this is the first involving the United Kingdom. Its purpose is to appreciate the fascinating history (captured by the Venerable Bede) of the conversion of the barbarian conquerors of England, starring the Irish and Roman missionaries. In Scotland, you will visit Kilmartin, Dumbarton and Loch Lomond; in England, Lindisfarne, Hadrian’s Wall and Durham Cathedral.

For more information, contact the Office of Alumni and Parent Engagement at 1-888-SAGEHEN or alumni@pomona.edu.

The Making of The Martian

December 2, 2015 by Carla Guerrero ’06 Comments Off

When producer Aditya Sood ’97 came across writer Andy Weir’s self-published book The Martian in 2013, it was selling on Amazon for 99 cents a download. Sood read the book and knew he had found something incredible—this is part of his job: find great, new material and projects to turn into movies.

The film The Martian, starring Matt Damon, opened on Oct. 2 and is now a box-office hit making nearly $100 million worldwide on opening weekend.

“When I read The Martian, I was blown away,” says Sood. “It is one of the best books I have ever read. I hadn’t seen anything like this, it’s a warm, human book which is so rare in science fiction, which can be a cold and distant genre.”

Sood, who is the president of Genre Films, brought the story to his company partner Simon Kinberg, and soon had Twentieth Century Fox behind it. With an incredible screenplay written by Drew Goddard, they were able to get Matt Damon and director Ridley Scott on board.

“We gave the script to Ridley Scott on a Friday and by Saturday, he called us to say he was in. Six months later, we were in Budapest starting filming,” recalls Sood.

Many of the positive reviews of the film highlight the accurate science and meticulous research that makes The Martian so good.

“More than anything, I’m just happy that we were able to translate Andy’s book into a movie that captured all of its values,” says Sood. “I wasn’t a science major at Pomona, but I’ve always loved science, and I get frustrated when movies don’t get science right but The Martian does. It tells a story that is entertaining and scientifically accurate—we used science to tell the story.”

Sood did major in Philosophy, Politics & Economics (PPE) at Pomona, but he took it upon himself to pursue his passion of films, signing up to receive the Hollywood Reporter in his school mailbox, and interning at New Line Cinema and Dreamworks. Sood passed over film school to come to Pomona and valued what the liberal arts had to offer.

“The greatest thing about Pomona was taking classes in any field. I’d always wanted to be an astronaut for the first 12 years of my life and so I took Bryan Penprase’s astronomy class my first year, which was great,” says Sood.

But Pomona holds a fond spot in his heart for more than academics. It was at Pomona that as a sophomore he met Becky Chassin ’98, his future wife.

“I was a sophomore with a terrible room draw, so my friends and I got doubles in Lyon. She was in a sponsor group right next door to us,” remembers Sood. “We introduced ourselves and became good pals. We were good friends through college and it wasn’t until many years later that we started dating. We got married three years ago.”

Along with the success of The Martian, Sood also recently celebrated the birth of his son, who he says “will hopefully be Pomona class of 2037.”

Sood has some advice for students wishing to make it in films: “Read everything you can—things that are movie-related, screenplays, books about the business, blogs, trade papers.”

He also tells students to find a group of like-minded friends who are into the same thing, friends who you can share information and experiences, and network with. That’s where 5C Claremont in Entertainment and Media (CEM) comes in. CEM recently organized a special screening of The Martian with a Q&A with Sood open to CEM and Pomona alumni.

“It’s incumbent upon students to figure that part out. It only helps you when you’re sharing experiences and information, that’s really valuable.”

Buckley completes term as Chair of Pomona College Board

August 3, 2015 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Outgoing Board Chair Jeanne Buckley ’65 with President David Oxtoby

OUTGOING CHAIR OF the Pomona College Board of Trustees Jeanne Martin Buckley ’65 received the Pomona College’s Alumni Distinguished Service Award at an Alumni Weekend program in Little Bridges on May 2, in honor of her many years of service to the College. Buckley, who completed her three-year term as board chair in June, has been a member of the board since 1999 and is the first woman and the first person of color to lead the board since the College’s founding in 1887.

“I have really appreciated the opportunity to work closely with Jeanne Buckley during her term as board chair over the last three years,” President David Oxtoby said. “She has provided steady and thoughtful leadership during a period of considerable change for Pomona College. I have been able to turn to her for helpful advice on many occasions.”

As an undergrad at Pomona in the early 1960s, Buckley took a range of leadership roles, participating in student government, choir and glee club, and helping to put on a jazz festival. For much of the time, she was the only Black woman attending Pomona, but she had been in the same situation in high school in Pelham, N.Y. “It was not a shock in a cultural sense,” she said in an interview a few years ago. “I could navigate it.”
After Pomona, she found her way into social work and was involved in the early days of Head Start. She also trained as an actress, landing a seven-episode stint on the popular primetime soap opera Peyton Place. In the end, a decade after graduating from Pomona, she decided to continue her education in law school, earning her J.D. from Empire College School of Law in 1979.

During a distinguished legal career, Buckley has specialized mainly in juvenile and family law and then served as a Sonoma County Superior Court Commissioner for more than a decade. In 1995, she was honored as Juvenile Court Judge of the Year by the California Judges Association and Woman of the Year by the Sonoma County Bar Association’s Women in Law group. Since 2003, she has been a professional panel member for Resolution Remedies, a firm specializing in mediation, arbitration and other forms of alternative dispute resolution. In 2004, she was recognized with the Bar Association’s Career of Distinction Award.
Prior to assuming the role of board chair, Buckley chaired both the Student Affairs Committee and the Academic Affairs Committee for four years and served on a number of other committees including the Executive Committee, Facilities and Environment Committee, Strategic Planning and Trusteeship.

Prince of LEGOs

August 3, 2015 by Mark Wood Comments Off

ON THE MORNING of July 10, Colin Walle ’91 needed only 1,997 more votes to see his dream come true—or at least, to take a very big step in that direction.

No, he wasn’t running for office. This was something more personal. His prize creation—based on a happy confluence of a children’s toy that he had never given up and a favorite book about never losing your inner child—was hanging in the balance.

Based on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, Walle’s proposed Little Prince LEGO project had accumulated 8,003 votes on the LEGO Ideas website. He now had 78 days left to hit 10,000. Reaching that threshold by the Sept. 27 deadline would mean that his pet project would move from a LEGO-lover’s fantasy to actual consideration for development and marketing as an official LEGO set.

Walle says he doesn’t remember a time when he didn’t play with LEGOs. “We had LEGO sets when I was a kid that predated my birth,” he recalls. But unlike most adults, Walle never put away his favorite toy. As a self-described “LEGO enthusiast,” he visits lots of aficionado websites, and one day he happened across one called LEGO CUUSOO, based on a Japanese word for “fantasy.” The site would later morph into LEGO Ideas.

“Basically, they have these different projects that anybody can submit,” he explains, “and then if they get enough votes, the LEGO Corporation will put them into a review stage and then consider making a real set based on your proposal.”

At the time, Walle happened to be reading The Little Prince to his son for the second time. He had first read the book in high school, but it was at Pomona that he really fell in love with Saint-Exupéry’s gentle fable. He even quoted some of the book’s most famous lines in his senior yearbook. (“‘Goodbye,’ said the fox. ‘And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’”)

So maybe it was inevitable that two of Walle’s fascinations would come together in a brainstorm. “The book was sitting on the banister upstairs, and I had this little LEGO Death Star sitting in close proximity to that,” he explains, “and it was sort of a eureka moment. ‘Wait a minute—this is a project I need to do.’ I had been such a big fan of the book for so many years, and the book prizes a child’s imagination and the emphasis on adults not forgetting what it’s like to be a child. And so I thought, ‘Well, wait a minute—here I am, 46 years old and into LEGOs.’ And it’s the perfect story to be made out of LEGOs.”

Before he could start building his prototype, however, he had to decide what to include. “My thought was, in the books you spend so much time on the asteroid, so I had to have the asteroid in the prototype. Originally, I came up with more of a two dimensional asteroid. And then talking to a friend of mine, he was telling me about how to make a three-dimensional, six-sided box that looks like a ball made of LEGOs. It’s a technique they call S.N.O.T, which sounds gross but it stands for ‘Studs Not on Top.’”

Walle also spent a lot of time building the airplane that crash lands in the desert, where the book’s narrator meets its title character. Other parts include a baobab tree, the main characters and the Little Prince’s rose under her glass dome.

Of course, even if Walle gets his 10,000 votes, there’s no guarantee that an actual Little Prince LEGO set willever hit the market. Winning prototypes for sets based on the TV comedy “The Big Bang Theory” and the movie “Wall-E” are now in production, he says, but others winning projects didn’t make the cut. Three projects based on the video game “The Legend of Zelda” hit the 10,000 mark, but no set has emerged, possibly because of licensing difficulties.

If the LEGO Corporation were to decide that the idea was marketable, they would engineer their own set, which might or might not resemble Walle’s admittedly rough prototype. “Frankly, they would build something better than what I did,” he says with a laugh. “Let’s be blunt about it. I’m just doing my best efforts, but they’re the professional designers.”

If it came to that, the Saint-Exupéry Estate would also have to sign off on the deal. That isn’t a sure thing either, but Walle has spoken with them and was thrilled to find that they were “nuts about the project. I can’t say that they will approve the license, but they definitely want this set made.”

Maybe that’s because the very idea of a man on a quest to create a toy based on a book that idealizes the wisdom and innocence of childhood is the kind of thing Saint-Exupéry himself would have appreciated. “Even when I was in college, I knew I wanted to have a family someday,” Walle says, “and now that I’m thinking about it maybe that’s part of what draws me to the book—in the sense that the story is also about protecting and valuing innocence: the way that the aviator tries to look out for the Little Prince, and the way that the prince cares for his rose.”

At the end of the day on July 10, the vote total had risen by three more votes—8,006 down, only 1,994 to go.

If you’d like to support Walle’s dream before the Sept. 27 deadline, you can cast your vote at ideas.lego.com/projects/50323

Celebrate!

August 3, 2015 by Gretchen Rognlien Comments Off

SAGEHENS ARE COMING together in record numbers—both in person and online—to learn, mingle and make a difference.

PCM-summer2015-web3_Page_25_Image_0002

Alumni Weekend 2015

This year’s Alumni Weekend brought together more than 1,600 alumni and guests for a weekend of for a weekend of fun, celebration and hundreds of campus activities, including performances, open houses and lectures. Highlights included the Daring Minds Speakers Series, featuring Blaisdell Award winners James Turrell ’65, Bill Keller ’70 and Mary Schmich ’75, the first-ever 47th Reunion, held by the Class of 1968 (see story on page 47), and a Claremont in Entertainment and Media panel featuring Richard Chamberlain ’56. At the gathering in Little Bridges preceding the Parade of Classes, Alumni Distinguished Service Award winners Jeanne Buckley ’65 P’92 and Stan Hales ’64 were recognized, class volunteers were celebrated and over $3 million in reunion class gifts were announced. (For more photos, see Last Word, page 64.)

Winter Break Parties

In January, Sagehens around the world flocked together in growing numbers to take part in a favorite community tradition. Winter Break Parties brought nearly 1,000 Pomona alumni, parents, students and friends together in 15 cities from Kansas City to Shanghai for laughter and libations, stories and Sagehen spirit. Interested in hosting a Winter Break Party in your city this season? Contact Kara Everin in the Office of Alumni & Parent Engagement at kara.everin@pomona.edu for more information.

Daring Minds Events

Pomona’s yearlong celebration to wrap up Campaign Pomona: Daring Minds kicked off last spring with a series of events designed to help Sagehens learn, mingle and make a difference. Highlights this spring included:

Daring Minds Lectures: On campus (including nationally noted poet Professor Claudia Rankine in April) and across the nation (including the East Coast lecture series in March, featuring Professors Amanda Hollis-Brusky and Char Miller).

4/7: A Celebration of Sagehen Impact: This social media-driven effort celebrated the good work and good will of a community full of “everyday Daring Minds.” More than 150 civic-minded Sagehens and friends posted about their good deeds, and the good deeds of Pomona friends, while hundreds more chirped their encouragement through “likes” and comments. Community members also pledged and performed service as part of the celebration, including 16 Seattle Sagehens who came together on a rainy Saturday to plant 447 trees at a local nature preserve. It’s not too early to start planning: What will you do to make a difference by next 4/7?

Senior Send-Off: For 47 hours leading up to Class Day and Commencement, hundreds of alumni, parents, faculty, staff, students and friends rallied for the College’s first Senior Send-Off, a mini-campaign to honor the graduating Class of 2015 and support Pomona education for all current students. Nearly 500 donors gave more than $80,000, and dozens more alumni, students, faculty and friends took to social media and the campaign web site to offer their “sage advice” to graduates as they make their life-changing transition.

Daring Minds Videos: Watch for your invitation to tune in for a series of Daring Minds videos to be made available starting in September. On the playlist are Professor Claudia Rankine and alumni James Turrell ’65, Bill Keller ’70 and Mary Schmich ’75.

Career Networking Events

Alumni volunteers across the country organized and hosted a series of career networking events this spring and summer. From Los Angeles to Chicago and New York, more than 100 members of the Pomona community came together to connect with fellow Sagehens and share industry-specific and general career stories and advice, and the program continues to grow! Interested in hosting a career networking event in your region? Contact the Alumni and Parent Engagement team at alumni@pomona.edu.

To make sure you hear about exciting events and opportunities yet to come, update your contact information by emailing alumni@pomona.edu or calling 1-888-SAGEHEN.

Travel/Study

Hawaiian Seascapes

(Big Island to Molokai)

With Professor Emeritus Rick Hazlett

Dec. 5–12, 2015

From Angles to Angels:

The Christianization of Barbarian England

With History Professor Ken Wolf

May 18–29, 2016

Inner Reaches of Alaska

June 4–11, 2016

Join Pitzer Professor of Environmental Analysis Paul Faulstich on an “un-cruise” through the stunning Inner Reaches Coves of Alaska. Aboard a small vessel serving 74 passengers, adventurers will travel from Juneau to Ketchikan, encountering stunning glacial landscapes, old-growth forests and incredible wildlife.

For more information, contact the Office of Alumni and Parent Engagement at

1-888-SAGEHEN or alumni@pomona.edu.

Raw Truth and Optimism: Chris Burden ’69 (1946-2015)

August 3, 2015 by Nate Stazewski Comments Off

A yellow and black sculpture in Pomona’s Lyon Garden stands as a silent testimony that artist Chris Burden ’69, who died of cancer at his home in May, started his artistic life as he finished it—as an amazing sculptor. Originally a part of Burden’s senior show, the work was recreated for the 2011-12 exhibition, “It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973.” Burden once said this piece “held the kernel for much of his subsequent work,” says Pomona College Museum of Art Director Kathleen Howe.

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In the decade after his graduation from Pomona, Burden was most famous (or maybe infamous) for a series of controversial—and often dangerous—performance art pieces that tested the limits of his courage and endurance. For “Shoot” (1971), an assistant shot Burden in the arm with a rifle while a Super-8 camera recorded the event on grainy film; and in “Trans-fixed” (1974), Burden was nailed face-up to a Volkswagen Beetle in a crucifixion pose. For his master’s thesis at the University of California, Irvine, he locked himself for five days inside an ordinary school locker. Other performance pieces found him shooting at a jet passing overhead, crawling through glass and lying down in heavy traffic on a crowded street.

As Kristine McKenna noted in a Los Angeles Times memorial, “Burden operated like a guerrilla artist, staging his pieces with little advance word. Many of the early performances took place in his studio, documented only by his friends. As artworks, they were experienced largely as rumor—and Burden did manipulate rumor as a creative material. When you heard about a Chris Burden performance, an image would streak through your mind like a blazing comet. That was part of the point.”

In 1979, “The Big Wheel”—in which an eight-foot flywheel made from three tons of cast iron was powered up by a revving motorcycle, then allowed to spin in silence for several hours—marked a dramatic shift in Burden’s artistic approach, combining performance with the kind of witty, inventive and monumental sculptural creation for which he would later become best known. Today, “The Big Wheel” remains in the collection of Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA).

“The Big Wheel” was followed by other monumental works, almost always involving some jaw-dropping surprise, such as “The Flying Steamroller” (1996), in which a counterbalanced steamroller did exactly what the title suggests, and “What My Dad Gave Me” (2008), a 65-foot skyscraper made entirely of parts from Erector sets.

Perhaps his most iconic work is the ongoing “Urban Light,” an array of restored, antique cast-iron street lamps at the entrance of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The Los Angeles Times notes that it “rapidly became something of an L.A. symbol.” LACMA director Michael Govan told the Times that Burden “wanted to put the miracle back in the Miracle Mile” and said his work “combines the raw truth of our reality and an optimism of what humans can make and do.”

PCM-summer2015-web3_Page_27_Image_0001 Back at Pomona, where it all started, that yellow and black sculpture now looks fairly tame. And yet, Howe notes, “In this early work you can see the interplay of his engagement with sculpture and aspects of performance. It is a remarkably assured piece from a young artist who was working through the issues that would engage him for the rest of his career.”

Pomona College Museum of Art senior curator Rebecca McGrew worked closely with Burden on the “It Happened at Pomona” exhibition, spending many hours with him in his studio. “Meeting Chris Burden and getting to know him is one of the biggest honors of my career,” McGrew says. “In addition to being brilliant, warm and amazingly easy to work with, Chris is one of the most important artists of the 20th and 21st centuries because his visionary and internationally renowned artwork challenges viewers’ beliefs about art and the contemporary world. I am so sorry to not be able to work with him again.”

The Tetrasept Reunion

August 3, 2015 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Photo of members of the Class of 1968 marching in the Alumni Weekend parade

THE CLASS OF 1968, which launched the College’s ongoing fascination with the number 47 years ago, has now given birth to a new tradition—the 47-year reunion. During Alumni Weekend, members of the class flocked back to Pomona for the first such gathering, and in honor of the occasion, they even created a new genre of poetry, which they dubbed the “tetrasept.”

At the center of it all was Bruce Elgin ’68, who—as a student in class with Professor Donald Bentley back in 1964—was one of originators of Pomona’s ongoing 47 search (along with Laurie Mets ’68). Elgin defines a tetrasept as a poetic form with “either four lines of seven syllables or seven lines of four syllables,” adding: “There are no rhyme or meter restrictions.”

During the build-up to the reunion, members of the class submitted tetrasepts about the reunion itself, the Class of ’68 or the cult of 47, for publication in a 32-page booklet. The submissions ranged from nostalgic to acerbic to esoteric, but they had one thing (in addition to their unique form) in common—they’re characteristic of the extraordinary inventiveness of one of Pomona’s most innovative classes.

Below are a few examples lifted from the booklet titled “Tetrasepts.”

From “Tetrasepts”

We call four score and seven

Oratory from heaven.

But other way ’round … not close:

Seven score and four—just gross!

—Bruce Elgin ’68

Greetings dear friends,

the deadline nears.

Words elude me.

What did I learn

at Pomona?

Procrastinate,

and words will come.

—Karen Porter MacQueen ’68

Why wait ‘til number fifty?

Let’s meet now, and let’s meet then.

Twice the fun! (Like letters here

Are two times forty-seven).

—Ruth Massaro (Henry) ’68

Forty-seven

Since sixty-four

Has proved to be

Unlikely lore;

So now ’hens fete

What shall endure

Forever more.

—Mary Jane Gibson ’68

Forty-seven

Have come and gone

My liberal

Education

Still a solid

Deep foundation

For a good life.

—Jill Kelly ¸’68

Where art thou forty-seven

Our class seeks you everywhere

In proofs, in ads, or even

A silly verse—on a dare.

—Diane Erwin ’68

They only are loyal to

this college who, departing,

bear their added riches in

trust for mankind. James Blaisdell

—Kathleen Wilson Selvidge ’68

Bentley proved all

Numbers equal

Forty-seven;

Hence Pomona

Class reunions

Always are the

Forty-seventh.

—Brian Holmes ’68

First Year: Vintage Made Simple

February 23, 2015 by Daniel Gould Comments Off

Bored of your wardrobe? Jonathan Starzyk ’14 might be able to help. For the past year, he’s been busy filling a gap in the world of men’s wear with his o johnathan-starzyck wn online store that sells unique vintage clothes. First created while he was a student at Pomona, Jonathan’s brand, STARZYK, is now based out of his hometown of Chicago. There, he’s working to make the business take root in the city and continue its growth, using creative efforts to connect with local buyers while still reaching style-minded guys across the country.

A CHANCE WORTH TAKING

Jonathan got his first exposure to the fashion world through summer internships with retailers and brands in Chicago, including a stint at international label French Connection. He loved the field’s link between artistic projects and business know-how, but sought more independence than he saw in some of the positions in the industry.

“I wanted to do something that I knew I’d be really invested in,” he says. “I felt like I understood what worked for a lot of these brands and what didn’t, and I wanted my voice to be heard.”

Interestingly, he was also realizing how difficult it was to find cool, distinctive outfits on his own. Thrift store shopping often meant hunting through racks of cluttered items for hours on end, only to go home empty-handed. Meanwhile, looks from better-known shops were quickly snatched up by others with similar tastes, making it hard to stand out from the crowd.

It wasn’t long before Jonathan sensed a way to tap an unmet need while having free rein to pursue his passion. Why not “gamble on myself,” he thought, and start his own venture?

FROM INCONVENIENCE TO OPPORTUNITY

With the help of a fellowship from student entrepreneurship group Pomona Ventures, Jonathan launched his website ShopStarzyk.com in the fall of his senior year. Selling everything from retro jackets and polos to swim shorts and tees, the site simplifies the tedious task of ‘thrifting’ by collecting quality apparel in one convenient source.

Jonathan finds his inventory by carefully combing through estate sales, thrift stores and other vintage hotspots in search of standout items. The selection process is based on a simple but effective rule: only offer clothes that Jonathan and his colleagues would seek out for themselves.

“We take the time to find pieces that we know we’d enjoy, and we think our customer would enjoy,” he says. “The brand is very much an extension of me and the things I like.”

Knowing he someday wanted to run a startup, Jonathan used the flexibility of his media studies major to pick up valuable skills for the fashion field. At Pomona he took courses in digital photography and graphic design, supplemented by a semester in Australia where he studied marketing. The preparation has paid off, allowing him to handle projects like shooting photos for lookbooks and designing his own logo.

“It’s nice to see how much I’ve grown from my learning experiences and how I’ve been able to apply them to a legitimate business,” he reflects.

LET THE CLOTHES DO THE TALKING

Since relocating to Chicago after graduation, Jonathan has been figuring out new ways to meet the challenges of running an online shop, the biggest of which is getting people to check out the product. The company lends itself well to social media platforms like Tumblr and Instagram, which Jonathan uses to target likely shoppers and define the brand’s look. Still, he says these tactics are just one piece of the puzzle.

“I’ve learned that people want to be able to interact with businesses in any way they can, and that’s hard to do with our online and social presence alone.”

One way to reach out to buyers is through pop-up shops, temporary stands where Jonathan sells his wares in strategic locations like fashion festivals and street fairs. “The idea is to be present, allow for interaction, and let the clothes do the talking,” he explains.

Wherever Jonathan’s current project leads him, friends and collaborators say they’ve come to expect his unique, self-confident style of career building. “Jonathan always has a vision of what he wants, and will go through a very interesting path to get there,” says Hannah Doruelo ’16, a friend from Chicago who interned at STARZYK for a semester to help get the company off the ground. “I really see him as a trailblazer.”

Making Waves: Youth-Led Change

February 23, 2015 by Daniel Gould Comments Off

DURING VISITS TO her hometown of Baltimore while she was a student at Pomona, Celia Neustadt ’12 started to notice some interesting shifts in the makeup of the city’s public spaces. The Inner Harbor waterfront, long seen by locals as a tourist-only enclave, had started attracting black teens from around the city looking for a place to shop and meet friends, a big change from when Neustadt herself was a Baltimore City high school student.

The influx of a new crowd, however, had also sparked new tensions. Complaints and concerns from business owners over loitering, theft and “rowdy” behavior were leading to curfews that prevented groups of teens from enjoying thedowntown district at night and after school, and bans that kept them out of popular clothing stores. Negative iteractions with police and security staff added to the resentment felt by Baltimore youth. The friction was palpable, Neustadt recalls, as she walked around the Harbor one night after an Orioles baseball game.

“Not only were there more teenagers than I remembered, but it felt kind of tense. There was a feeling in the air, like if someone lit a match, it would spread like wildfire.”

Intrigued and concerned, Neustadt came back to Pomona for her senior year and began making connections between her own observations and concepts she was studying as a sociology major.

“I had become really interested in these ideas about the power of public spaces,” she says. “I wanted to see if teens were intentionally staking a claim to this space, and figure out how they were using it.”

Neustadt channeled her curiosity into a proposal for a youth-led research team that would help amplify the voices of young people of color who felt excluded from the area. After winning a Napier Grant designed to promote leadership in social change, she went back to Baltimore the summer after her graduation and kicked off a new community organization, the Inner Harbor Project (IHP).

Since its launch in 2012, the IHP has brought together a cohort of high school students from neighborhoods around Baltimore to try to uncover the sources of conflict in the city’s downtown. Building on a tradition in social justice work known as participatory action research, the IHP’s student staffers have combed the city to hold focus groups with other teens, while also interviewing stakeholders such as land developers, security companies and business owners.

The conversations have shed some much-needed light on the issue. Community leaders now have a better understanding of why the Harbor is so valuable to young people looking for a vibrant and inclusive space to call their own.

“Teenagers don’t have that many places to go to in Baltimore, and so they really flock to the Inner Harbor,” Neustadt explains. “They feel like they’ve lucked into this larger world.”

Still, the project has also put a focus on problems like encounters between teens and police, which often cause mistrust and lead to more serious confrontations down the road. To create a takeaway for policymakers and officials, the group used its findings to draw up a list of proposals to reduce tensions and improve safety, catching the attention of local media and politicians. Some of their recommendations were even incorporated into the city’s most recent master plan for the waterfront district.

Neustadt, who says the response from City Hall and local businesses has been “overwhelmingly positive,” credits the Inner Harbor Project’s success to the teens themselves and their ability to draw upon their own lived experiences.

“This organization is about recognizing the extreme potential that these young people have to effect change in their city,” she insists. “They and only they have the answers to this issue that has people at the city level scratching their heads.”

While Neustadt is modest about her own contributions, others stress how her clear values and vision laid the foundation for the program and the positive results that have followed.

“I think Celia’s commitment to community and change has been instrumental in this work,” says Professor of Sociology and Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies Gilda Ochoa, a trusted mentor from Pomona who encouraged Neustadt to involve youth in the project and work from their perspective.

Looking ahead, Neustadt is hopeful that the organization might serve as a model for other cities that struggle with conflict between police and youth of color at their tourist attractions, mentioning locations like the French Quarter in New Orleans and Millennium Park in Chicago.

“This is my attempt to create a little ounce of change, to create a structure for having a discussion about inequality and the way spaces are used. I don’t see myself doing anything else for a long time.”

Alumni News

February 23, 2015 by Staff Comments Off

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Sagehens Flock to Fall Networking Events

Last fall, as students convened on campus for another year of discovery, collaboration and fun, hundreds of alumni and friends also came together to learn and laugh in a series of networking events hosted by Pomona.

In November, more than 120 Sagehens braved the rain in Washington, D.C., to attend the College’s third annual “Pomona in the City.” Held at the stunning Carnegie Institution for Science, the event was hosted by Susanne Garvey ’74. Alumni, parents and friends mingled and enjoyed lectures from Pomona faculty Pierre Englebert, David Menefee-Libey, Cameron Munter, Mary Paster, John Seery and Lenny Seligman, and from President David Oxtoby.

Sagehens on the right coast also flocked to the College’s first East Coast Career Networking Series, with events in New York City, Boston and Washington, D.C. The NYC event, hosted by John Popp ’78, was headlined by The New York Times education reporter Richard Pérez-Peña ’84. In Boston, award-winning architect Chris Chu ’76 shared highlights of her career journey (including a feature on HGTV’s “This Old House Boston”), and the series concluded in the Beltway with remarks by Mikey Dickerson ’01, Chief Administrator of the U.S. Digital Service (and subject of fall’s PCM cover story).

Meanwhile, on the West Coast, Sagehen volunteers spearheaded a San Francisco Tech Happy Hour, and dozens of alumni and current Pomona students gathered at the City Club for the perennial Los Angeles Finance Networking Event, overseen this year by Meg Lodise ’85.

In December, the Los Angeles Entrepreneurship and Investing Alumni Panel, hosted by Marcia Goodstein ’86 at her Idealab offices in Pasadena, closed out an exciting events season for Pomona alumni and friends.

Thank you to the many Sagehen hosts, speakers and attendees who participated in the success of these spirited events. To be sure you hear about upcoming networking events in your area, bookmark the College events calendar at pomona.edu/alumni/events, join the Pomona Alumni Facebook group at facebook.com/groups/ sagehens and make sure your contact information is up to date by emailing alumni@pomona.edu.

BULLETIN BOARD

Worldwide Happy Hour on March 11

Mark your calendar. The next Claremont Colleges Worldwide Happy Hour is scheduled for March 11, 2015. Held every year in September and March, the Happy Hour brings together hundreds of alumni from all seven Claremont Colleges at dozens of bars and restaurants around the world. Want to make sure there’s a Happy Hour near you? Consider hosting and adding your own city to the list! For more information, contact Lauren Bergeron ’05 at lauren.bergeron@pomona.edu.

Connecting Sagehens

Looking for a useful tool to locate and connect with Pomona alums in your area or during travels? Sagehen Connect has been helping Pomona alums get in touch since fall 2013. This free app is available through the iTunes App Store and Google Play and offers easy mobile access to fun and helpful features such as:

searchable alumni directory
mapped results of nearby alumni
alumni information via LinkedIn
the Alumni Events Calendar
Pomona-Pitzer sports
news, schedules, broadcasts

To get connected, just grab your iPhone or Android and visit pomona.edu/sagehenconnect. Chirp!

Chirp Along With Sagehens on Pomona’s Social Media

Meet up with fellow alumni online for discussions of all varieties, new and “throwback” Pomona pictures, alumni news and events, Sagehen sports and more. Join facebook.com/ groups/sagehens and follow @SagehenAlumni on Twitter to get in on the fun and to share your own Pomoniana (include #47sightings and #pomonacollege in your posts and tweets!).

TRAVEL-STUDY

Hawaiian Seascapes (Big Island to Molokai)

With Geology Professor Rick Hazlett

Dec. 5–12, 2015

Board the Safari Explorer for a seven-day cruise from the Big Island of Hawaii to Molokai, with stops on West Maui and the “private island” of Lanai. Enjoy dramatic volcanic backdrops, marine life sightings, and opportunities for snorkeling, kayaking and paddleboarding. Join Geology Professor Rick Hazlett for this seagoing tour, with a look into the islands’ volcanic origins, history and diversity of sea life. Highlights include a night snorkel with giant Pacific manta rays, a marine life search in the Humpback National Marine Sanctuary and an evening pa’ina (feast) and Hawaiian jam session on Molokai.

From Angles to Angels: The Christianization of Barbarian England

With History Professor Ken Wolf TBA (2015 or 2016)

For more information about these or any of our other trips, please contact the Pomona College Alumni Office at (909) 621-8110 or alumni@pomona.edu.

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