Blog Articles

History & Change

September 4, 2014 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

Hong Deng Gao ’15

MAJOR: History
SUPPORTED BY: Financial Aid, Draper Center for Community Partnerships, Summer Undergraduate Research Program, The Annual Fund

A native of China, Hong and her mother moved to Brooklyn in 2005. When her mother developed life-threatening liver disease, Hong helped her navigate the often confusing public hospital system. Determined to improve access to health care for other low-income immigrants, Hong developed a proposal through the Draper Center to train college volunteers as health navigators for patients with limited English proficiency and literacy. Hong devotes much of her free time to the Draper Center, working as a coordinator for programs such as Alternabreak, a community engagement spring break program.

History as explanation

“Because of my immigrant background, I like to trace things back to their origins, whether it’s the earliest pilgrims, or Chinese immigrants who came in the 1800s, or recent refugee groups. It can really help explain some of what we see now. Why do Chinatowns exist in the U.S. today? What were the Chinese discriminatory laws that were passed back then and how do they still impact people today?”

In the library and on the ground

“I’ve been working with Professor (Samuel) Yamashita on the impact Chinese restaurants have had on Chinese-American communities. In the summer after my sophomore year, I went to New York, where I interviewed and observed children who help out in their parents’ Chinese takeout restaurants and Korean grocery stores. I went back to New York this summer, and to Honolulu and San Francisco, where I conducted archival research in local libraries and museums on high-end Chinese restaurants. I wanted to know what these upscale restaurants mean in the context of Chinese immigration and race relations, and the history of restaurants in the three cities. So, in a sense, my research has been both sociological and historical.”

A mother’s struggle, a daughter’s inspiration

“My mom was the inspiration for my social entrepreneurship project with the Draper Center. She had liver disease, and from the time I was about 15 years old, I helped her deal with the public hospital system, because it was hard for her to do it on her own. She didn’t really speak any English and couldn’t read the signs or the documents or bills. When I got to Pomona, I started thinking more about this issue and how I could help other non-English speaking immigrants.”

Building a bridge to better health care

“The idea I came up with is Health Bridges, where bilingual college volunteers work with local hospitals to give parents like my mom the emotional support they need and help them understand and navigate the system.

The students are definitely going to be a lot more competent in understanding the hospital procedures than these immigrant patients who are already sick and tired and can’t really deal with the system anymore.” [Health Bridges is dedicated to Hong’s mother, Jian Li Lin, who died in 2011.]

Coaching from the Draper Center

“Emily Arnold-Hernandez ’99, who teaches a social entrepreneurship workshop at the Draper Center, helped us develop our visions, goals and budgets, and to understand every single detail of how nonprofit organizations work. Where do you get funding? What are all the questions that you need to think about and have prepared before you can pitch the proposal to a funder? It was really great. I’m planning to start a pilot project this semester and, if it works out, to take a gap year before grad school to fully develop the program in different hospitals and expand it to other college campuses.”

Academia and social change

“I’ve been thinking about the question of how to bridge academia with social justice and social change. Some people see them as very distinct fields, but I think as a scholar you can still make a huge impact in society. You can change the mindset of your audience. And if the audience is policy makers or other scholars or even college students, and if they go on and take this message with them, then that’s the impact that I’d like to have.”

Daring Minds

“When I think of Daring Minds, I think of three characteristics. One is to have a vision; second is to be willing to take the risk of implementing that vision; and third is accomplishing your goal by taking concrete steps, not being afraid of failure and persevering until the end.”

Jerry Maguire Moments

September 4, 2014 by Jeremy Kniffin Comments Off

The walls of the Athletes First offices are filled with autographed jerseys, photos and other memorabilia from their National Football League clients, including such household names as Aaron Rodgers, Ray Lewis, Drew Bledsoe and Clay Matthews. Among the jerseys and photos in Andrew Kessler’s office is a framed copy of Newsday from 2011 showing a photo of New York Jets quarterback and Athletes First client Mark Sanchez celebrating a 28–21 playoff win over the New England Patriots with an exuberant scream and a handshake over the front railing of the stands.

Kessler ’03, who is a certified contract advisor and player agent with Athletes First in Laguna Hills, and who helped negotiate the (yes) 47-page rookie contract for Sanchez, is on the receiving end of the handshake. “My Jerry Maguire moment,” he laughs. “That was an AP photo, so it ended up everywhere.”

After graduating from Pomona with a degree in English, and playing for four years on the Sagehens football team, Kessler jumped right into his current field working at IMG Sports with Tom Condon, ranked by Sports Illustrated as the most influential sports agent in the country last year. Kessler, whose father has been a long-time legal representative for the NFL Players Association, had already served an internship with NBA agent Marc Fleisher while attending Pomona, traveling with 18-year old client Tony Parker to various NBA workouts (Parker has since gone on to win four NBA titles with the San Antonio Spurs and former Sagehen coach Gregg Popovich).

In his first two years at IMG, Kessler assisted Condon in putting together landmark contracts for Peyton Manning (seven years, $90 million) and Eli Manning (six years, $54 million), while also attending law school at the University of Texas. In his decade in the field at IMG and Athletes First, where he has worked primarily with David Dunn (No. 11 on the Sports Illustrated list of most influential agents), Kessler has been a part of negotiating contracts that total well over a billion dollars.

Most recently, Kessler helped put together a four-year, $40 million dollar deal for Super Bowl champion safety Earl Thomas of the Seattle Seahawks, making him the highest-paid player ever at his position. Kessler returned to his original home in New York City in February to see Thomas win Super Bowl XLIII at the Meadowlands, before helping to negotiate his landmark deal. Of course, Athletes First was guaranteed to be on the winning side of that Super Bowl regardless, as the firm also represents several members of the Denver Broncos, including wide receiver Wes Welker and linebacker Von Miller.

Kessler, who resides in Laguna Beach with his wife, Alison, and son, Jordan (2), has found success in a highly-competitive, big-money industry at an age when he has been younger than some of his clients. He draws some personal parallels to his playing days for Pomona-Pitzer football, when his teams went a combined 17–15 over four years despite fielding small rosters that were often significantly outweighed by their opponents.

“One lesson I learned from playing at Pomona is that you can’t judge a book by its cover,” he said. “Just about every game we played, we would lose the eyesight test. Sometimes if you just looked at the two teams in warm-ups, you’d think we’d lose by three or four touchdowns, but then the game would start and we’d win by playing harder, smarter or more fundamental football. You see the same things on the job, whether it be negotiating a contract or signing a player or issues with a client. The odds might look against you from the outside looking in, but you can accomplish your goals by digging deeper than the other guys and not being intimidated.”

He is also quick to point out that his academic experience at Pomona has been a big influence on his career. “Most of what I have learned in this business has come from on-the-job training or from my dad,” he said. “But the critical thinking and analytical skills that I use in my profession have come just as much from what I learned at Pomona, as an English major studying Henry James novels, as they have from taking law school courses in contract law.”

Although Kessler willingly made a reference to Jerry Maguire, the fictional sports agent played by Tom Cruise in the 1996 movie (best remembered for the phrase, “show me the money”), he does laugh at the way the movie portrays his line of work. “I imagine it’s the same way that real spies view James Bond movies,” he says. “People may see the eight-figure deals in the headlines, but there’s a real grind and blue-collar element to the job, which I enjoy. It takes months of negotiations and legwork to reach those deals. You can’t just walk in and say ‘give me this, I want it.’ You have to justify your rationale to the team.”

The life of a sports agent can also involve much more than negotiating the fine print of a 47-page contract, and Kessler feels that makes it even more rewarding. “One of my favorite things about this business is that you get to be involved in a lot of different charitable endeavors and other outside interests for your clients,” he says. “I’ve helped our clients raise money for sick kids, families of veterans, youth football organizations and all sorts of things. Some clients just want you involved in one specific part of their lives, and with other clients, you find yourself wearing a lot of different hats—relationship counselor, wedding planner, financial advisor, and you get to talk to them all the time.”

Kessler may also have a career-building opportunity as the primary agent representing Marqise Lee, a second-round pick of the Jacksonville Jaguars in the 2014 NFL Draft. Lee has a Hollywood-type story of overcoming a rough childhood that saw him bounce around several foster homes before becoming the Fred Biletnikoff Award winner at USC as the nation’s top wide receiver.

While his professional experience has been largely centered on the NFL, Kessler has also used his success at Athletes First to begin his own side project called K3 Tennis, which is representing Ernesto Escobedo, a 17-year-old rising star from West Covina. “I’m excited about it,” said Kessler. “It’s still in its early stages and if nothing else, it’s really fun. Some might call it a risky move to invest in something on my own, but that’s always been my personality. I traveled 3,000 miles from New York City to attend Pomona, which was a little bit risky, and I really liked my time at Pomona. When a risk like that pays off, you’re more willing to take other risks.”

His career as an athlete and as an agent has also given Kessler some philosophical perspective. Athletics is, by its nature, hyper-competitive, with a player’s or team’s value often defined by just a simple list of wins and losses. That attitude spills over into other sports-related industries as well. An agent’s success can be defined by wins and losses in contract negotiations, clients signed and dollars generated. Failures happen, and he sometimes sees colleagues who take each defeat as hard as the players on the field do.

“You have to appreciate successes,” he said. “You hear people say that they hate losing more than they like winning, and I understand that philosophy, but you have to have balance or you won’t be happy. My bad days aren’t really all that bad. On my good days, I’ve been there to see Earl Thomas win a Super Bowl. I’ve been there with Marqise Lee and his family when he was drafted, after he overcame so much adversity.”

Of course, he was also there to celebrate a big playoff win with Mark Sanchez and end up with his picture in newspapers all over the country.

“If you can’t enjoy a moment like that,” he says. “Something’s wrong.”

Alumni Awards for 2014

September 4, 2014 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Blaisdell Distinguished Alumni Awards for 2014

The Blaisdell Distinguished Alumni Award honors alumni for achievement in their professions or community service, particularly those who have lived up to the quotation from James A. Blaisdell which is inscribed into the gates of the College: “They only are loyal to this college who departing bear their added riches in trust for mankind.” This year, there are three winners:

Ifeanyi “Tony” Menkiti’64 taught philosophy at Wellesley College for 40 years and is the author off our collections of poetry: Before a Common Soil (2007), Of Altair, the Bright Light (2005), The Jubilation of Falling Bodies (1978), and Affirmations (1971). He is the owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square, the nation’s oldest continuous all-poetry bookshop.

Born in Onitsha, Nigeria, he came to Pomona in 1961 on the ASPAU program (African Scholar-ship Program of American Universities). After Pomona, he attended Columbia University Pulitzer School of Journalism, New York University and Harvard University. In 1975, he received a fellowship in poetry from the Massachusetts State Council on the Arts and Humanities, followed in 1978 by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to his collections, his poems have appeared in Sewanee Review, Ploughshares, New Directions, The Massachusetts Review and other publications.

In 1996, he received the Pinanski Prize for Excellence in Teaching from Wellesley College.

Joe Palca’74 has been a science correspondent for National Public Radio since 1992. He has covered a range of topics, from biomedical research to astronomy, and is currently focused on the series, Joe’s Big Idea, which explores the minds and motivations of scientists and inventors.

Palca began his career in 1982 as a health producer for the CBS affiliate in Washington,D.C. In 1986, he began a seven-year stint as a print journalist, first with Nature and then with Science Magazine. In 2009, he took a six-month leave from NPR to become science writer in residence at The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens.

Palca has won numerous awards for his work,including the National Academies Communications Award, the Science-in-Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Prize. With Flora Lichtman, Palca is the co-author of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us (Wiley, 2011).

A psychology major at Pomona, he later earned both an M.S. and a Ph.D. in psychology at UC Santa Cruz, where he studied human sleep physiology.

Rip Rapson’74 is president and CEO of The Kresge Foundation, a national, private foundation based in Detroit. Since 2006, he has led Kresge in developing programs in arts and culture, education, environment, health,human services and the renewal of Detroit, distributing approximately $150 million annually.

Rapson was a political science major at Pomona, graduating magna cum laude. After at-tending Columbia Law School, he joined the Minneapolis law firm of Leonard, Street and Deinard. He was recruited in 1989 to become the deputy mayor of Minneapolis under Mayor Don Fraser, and was primary architect of the pioneering Neighborhood Revitalization program, a 20-year, $400 million effort to strengthen Minneapolis neighborhoods.

Prior to joining Kresge, Rapson was president of the Minnesota-based McKnight Foundation and also launched the Itasca Project, a private sector-led effort to develop a new regional agenda fort he Twin Cities.

He is the author of two books: Troubled Waters, a chronicle of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act legislation, and Ralph Rap-son: Sixty Years of Modern Design, a biography of his father, a renowned architect.Inspirational Young Alumni Award Lt.

Inspirational Young Alumni Award

Francine Segovia’04, a U.S. Navy Reserve research psychologist at the Robert E.Mitchell Center for Prisoner of War Studies, assists survivors recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She is part of a team of scientists and medical specialists examining how optimism and resilience may boost the health of extreme trauma victims.

Segovia, who will return to active-duty service at the U.S. Naval Medical Center in San Diego, attributes her research skills to experience she gained while at Pomona, including participation in the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP). “The critical thinking skills graduates from an institution like Pomona possess have a direct impact on all your work moving forward,” she says. “These skills have helped me tremendously as I navigated my career.”

Code

September 4, 2014 by Mark Wood Comments Off

This is surely a first, so (cue the trumpet fanfare) welcome to the first editor’s letter ever written in code.

Not all of it, of course—as you can tell from the simple fact that you’re reading this. But in an issue on the theme of “code,” in addition to articles about genetic code and computer code and decoding animal calls, there had to be something about the clandestine side of the word. But alas, try as I might, I was unable to unearth a single Pomona source for a story about ciphers. Which shouldn’t have surprised me, I suppose, since the world of cryptology is, by its very nature, a secretive one.

So to fill that void, please forgive me for offering this light-hearted tutorial on a subject I’ve found intriguing ever since my secret decoder ring childhood.

Each paragraph below demonstrates a different cipher, and—don’t say I didn’t warn you—the codes get progressively harder as they go along. There are instructions in each paragraph to help you translate the next, but if you want to play along, you’ll have to work for it.

We’ll start with one of the oldest and simplest of codes—the Caesar cipher, named for the great Roman himself, who used it in his letters. In this substitution cipher, each letter is replaced by another a fixed number of letters up or down the alphabet. Once you figure out that number, the rest is easy.

Ecguct ekrjgtu ctg ejknf’u rnca vq fgeqfg, dwv vjga ctg cnuq vjg dcuku qh eqorngz eqfgu nkmg vjg Xkpgig`tg ekrjgt, kp yjkej c yqtf rtqxkfgu vjg mga hqt ownvkrng Ecguct ekrjgtu kp c tqvcvkpi ugswgpeg. Vjg pgzv rctcitcrj, hqt gzcorng, wugu “CDE” cu kvu mga. Vjwu, vjg hktuv ngvvgt ku qpg ngvvgt qhh, vjg ugeqpf vyq qhh, vjg vjktf vjtgg qhh, vjgp dcem vq qpg, cpf uq qp.

Sfb Ugkdeb`qc tzq qgmrffq sm yd skapbzixajb, asq hl zqwmsmdqymgw, qgmpd yod dxlmrr jxrr tnpar. Red mkkw qqsix skapbzixajb bgmgco hq qgc “lmc-qhkb oya,” vffbf rrcp zl bmrfqc qdvq zq x jcv. Sm adalcc, vns ptzqqyzs red lrlcohaxk txksb nd bzae kcqsco hl qgc hdw (X dorzjp ycon; X bpsxkq 25) cqmj sfb dorhtxkcks jbsrbq gk sfb lcprydd. Yac 26 rl zlv mcdzrfuc odqrkr. Ffllqc poyzdq xmb mtlzssxsglm, uehae zpb ccidrbc gk qcxk alcca lcpryddq xmwtzw. Qgc hdw edpb hq qgc chpps nxqydqymg mc sffr jbsrbq.

Bm ggc’nw wfqp rhna wsk qcw gyla fx rm ucxknghjd sc ysogg mw b of. Zs hweykewceokaarl.

And with that, welcome to the wonderful world of code.

///////////////////////////////

Stray Thoughts (decoded)

Here is the plain text of the three enciphered paragraphs in the Stray Thoughts:

[Caesar Cipher:]
Caesar ciphers are child’s play to decode, but they are also the basis of complex codes like the Vinegère cipher, in which a word provides the key for multiple Caesar ciphers in a rotating sequence. The next paragraph, for example, uses “ABC” as its key. Thus, the first letter is one letter off, the second two off, the third three off, then back to one, and so on.

[Vinegére Cipher:]
The Vinegère was thought to be unbreakable, but in cryptography, those are famous last words. The only truly unbreakable cipher is the “one-time pad,” which uses an entire text as a key. To decode, you subtract the numerical value of each letter in the key (A equals zero; Z equals 25) from the equivalent letter in the message. Add 26 to any negative result. Ignore spaces and punctuation, which are deleted in real coded messages anyway. The key here is the first paragraph of this letter.

[One-Time Pad Cipher:]
If you’ve come this far, you must be as intrigued by codes as I am. So congratulations.

The Atomic Art of Millikan Hall

November 6, 2013 by Daniel Gould Comments Off

milliikanatom

Aging Millikan Hall, built at the dawn of the Space Age, is being torn down and rebuilt to state-of-the-art standards over the next two years. But the iconic atomic artwork on the west facade of the building will be preserved and prominently displayed on the new building.

atomsideview Commissioned for Pomona College’s new math, physics and astronomy lab back in 1958, the bronze atom sculpture facing College Avenue was designed by noted sculptor Albert Stewart, whose work adorns civic buildings nationwide, including the U.S. Mint in San Francisco. Before his death in 1965, Stewart created counterparts for the atom for the facades of Seaver North and South, with an image of cell division for biology and an array of particles for chemistry.

Stewart got his start in the 1930s as an artist for the Depression-era Works Progress Administration. In 1939, he was named a professor of fine arts at Scripps College, and he soon figured in a group of prominent regional artists that included Sam Maloof and Millard Sheets. Stewart also designed and donated the Pegasus relief on Stover Walk, (though Steve Comba, associate director of the Pomona College Museum of Art, points out that the current piece is a recast from the original, apparently stolen back in the ’70s).

Today the atom sculpture on Millikan holds up better as art than as science. Professor of Physics and Astronomy Alma Zook ’72 calls it a “not-very-accurate representation of a lithium atom.” With our present understanding of the atomic and subatomic worlds, the three electrons circling on the atom’s fringes would be more properly depicted as a dispersed cloud, rather than the classical image of a series of orbits, like planets rotating around a sun.

Nonetheless, as Zook herself notes, the design makes for a “nice threefold symmetry.” And once the new Millikan is built, the atom artwork will be returned to its rightful place over Millikan’s doorway to College Avenue as a “historical nod to the original construction,” says Andrea Ramella, project manager for the new building.

Read more here about the Millikan project.

Entrepreneurship & Social Justice

November 6, 2013 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

In Class with Professor Jerry Irish

In today’s small group discussion for the class, Religion, Ethics and Social Practice, six college students and three residents of Pilgrim Place discuss social entrepreneurship, which combines ideas and practices from both the business and nonprofit worlds to solve problems such as poverty and inequality. The group focuses on whether social entrepreneurs, who seek to create social value rather than wealth, are compromising their values by working within the capitalist system.

Miranda: I’m really interested in exploring the debate about whether social entrepreneurships are a Band-Aid, because you’re working within a corrupted system, or are they about trying to change that system and using the tools effectively to do so.

Eleanor: I just heard a woman over at Pilgrim Place earlier this morning, who spoke about being in China. She said she asked one of the men there, who teaches Marxism at the university: ‘Do you think Marxism has a future?’ And he said back to her: ‘Do you think capitalism has a future?’ I think if there is a possibility of envisioning a future for capitalism, it has to do with something like social entrepreneurships.

Karl: I’ve found out from my younger radical community organizing days that there is a place and a need for Band-Aids; there is a need for cooperating with the system at some point, even if you’re not altogether happy with it, and there is a need for trying to find innovative ways to bring things together that seem to be diametrically opposed—like business and community organizing. I think you come to a healthy understanding of what is the best thing to do for the most common good at the time.

Christian: I don’t see it as a Band-Aid at all. I see business and profit-seeking and these sorts of drivers as extraordinarily powerful tools. Some advancements, such as electricity and drugs like penicillin, have come about because of capitalism, because we incentivize them. If you have the motivation from the get-go to do something for the social good, a social entrepreneurship can be a truly amazing tool that can be used in really cool ways. That’s the way I see it, but I come from a family that is very pro-business, very different from a lot of people in this room.

Irish: In Bangladesh, Muhammed Yunus tried a Band-Aid. He found that for $27 dollars he could relieve 42 women stool makers in Jobra of their indebtedness. But just for one week. And then the loan sharks would come right back. It was his idealism about trying to overcome the poverty gap he saw in this village that alerted him to the fact that he needed to go beyond a Band-Aid. He rallied his students and took them to talk to people in the community to see what they needed. That’s when he got the idea that maybe he could leverage the banks. When he discovered he couldn’t, he created his own bank. Do any of you see in either your placements or project proposals the seeds of something like this in the future? Are there ingredients that you could imagine one day that you would employ or work off of as a social entrepreneur?

Christian: My proposal is trying to understand the adherence to medication in Third World companies. One of the major issues is the way the pharmacological system works. Drug companies send HIV and TB medication to Third World countries as window dressing, without any analysis of what’s needed. It’s extraordinarily expensive, especially when you deal with adherence issues, which means the disease becomes resistant and then you can’t use first-line drugs. And these programs don’t even come close to offering second-line drugs.

Becca: This is about the Coronado Garden project I work on with the Draper Center. It’s an organic garden and a curriculum on food justice and environmental justice at Coronado, an alternative high school in West Covina. The teacher has expressed an interest in selling plants, which could be a way to make the whole project self-sustainable. It would also get merged into a small business class. I’m struggling with envisioning this transition.

Mia: Why do you struggle?

Becca: I think it’s the idea that we’ve been very much trying to cultivate the garden as this safe green space and connect food justice and environmental justice with greater societal injustices and connect that with students’ everyday lives, so encouraging them to use the garden as a tool for money—although it would create a self-sustained project, it feels hypocritical to me.

Miranda: I don’t think that is hypocritical because when you’re incorporating funding into a closed loop, self-sufficient system, you’re ultimately benefiting the project for the future.

Irish: You’re changing the definition of investment, that the capital gets invested in a social purpose. What you’re exhibiting are the skills that are entrepreneurial, and I don’t think some of these skills need to be understood simply in terms of a profit. This gets closer to this issue that you brought up in your reflections, a new kind of citizenship and—I hate to bring in my friend Niebuhr (laughter)—the notion of responsibility to a larger social group.

Christian: You have to play it like a community organizer and trust that people will tend to do the right thing most of the time. By allowing capitalism to inject itself into these social entrepreneurships, we worry about becoming tainted, but it leverages all you can do. If you were to talk about Bill Gates in the late ’90s, you’d say he was completely co-opted by the capitalist system, but look at the way he’s leveraged the funds he produced. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a great example; it does really good stuff and is extraordinarily efficient, much more efficient than any other charity or nonprofit group.

Karen: I’m learning a lot from hearing the stories from the elders and the things that we’ve all experienced about having a vision for some sort of project and then having the initiative to do it. I feel I don’t have a full grasp of all of that yet, but I’m definitely learning. I really like the idea that social entrepreneurship is contagious. You start something and then the people you work with are empowered to do their own thing. I feel like I’m catching the bug here.

Changing the Equation

November 6, 2013 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

When he started thinking about college, Johnny Huynh ’14 had two goals—to leave his hometown of Claremont and to attend a large research university. That all changed after a weekend visit to Pomona, where he says he “fell in love with the College.” A first-generation college student and son of Vietnamese immigrants, Johnny balances a demanding academic schedule as an economics and mathematics double major with weekly outings to Pomona’s Organic Farm, where he can practice the gardening skills he learned from his mom.

It All Starts With Lunch
“Before I came here, I thought that having lunch with professors was just a marketing spiel—I figured they had their research and classes and wouldn’t have time to talk to students. I was really surprised. I’ve had lots of dinners and lunches with professors. I think it complements your learning, and because you know them, you’re not afraid to ask questions.”

Digging Deeper
“I was really motivated by a course on labor economics I took with Professor [Michael] Steinberger and approached him about doing summer research. The project we worked on was evaluating a specific conditional cash transfer (CCT) program in Malawi that targets schoolgirls 13 to 22 years old. CCTs are welfare programs, mostly in developing countries, that distribute cash to families to encourage more schooling and to increase test scores. The current literature finds that on average the conditional cash transfers are more effective than unconditional transfers, but what the research hasn’t looked at yet is the heterogeneity—whether some students respond differently than others.”

Changing the Equation
“What we found when we crunched recent data from the World Bank is that the subsidies are more effective at increasing attendance to the 80 percent benchmark if a student is already attending at high rates of schooling, say, 70 percent or more. Raising attendance from 10 to 80 percent is much harder, because so many children from poor families have to work. Giving that up to attend school means a lot of lost income for their families. “One of the things we’re proposing as a way to improve educational opportunities for these students is that the threshold for attendance be lowered from 80 to 50 percent. Another alternative would be to increase the cash subsidy to offset the income these girls would be giving up to be students.”

Learning to Roll With the Punches
“As a researcher, you can’t anticipate what you’re trying to find. If you’re looking through the data or building a theoretical model, the outcome might be different from what you expected, so you have to learn to change gears and roll with the punches. You’re not entirely sure what you’re going to write about because it’s new research, something no one has ever done before. It’s difficult, but it’s really, really rewarding.”

Not Just Theoretical
“Both my parents were immigrants from Vietnam, and neither of them attended high school, let alone college. They both still work for the minimum wage, and our housing is subsidized. Being on welfare affects me personally as well as theoretically, and I think it’s valuable to have a perspective that a lot of researchers don’t have, especially when it comes to public policy programs and finding out which ones work and which ones fail.”

A Message to Pomona
“Thank you, thank you, thank you. That’s the first thing I would say. That dominates everything else. I’m grateful I had the chance to come here, and that Pomona does so much to help students in need. After I graduate, I’d like to somehow help reform the social safety net, so other people can get the help they need to succeed.”

Strengthening Summer Research

Johnny Huynh ’14 was among the more than 220 Pomona College students who spent last summer conducting research on topics ranging from organic solar cells to Joseph Haydn’s keyboard sonatas. About 80 percent of the students were supported by the College’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP), which provides funding for up to 10 weeks of collaborative research in the natural sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities.

Expanding and strengthening summer research is one of the goals of Campaign Pomona: Daring Minds. Since the start of the campaign, the number of students participating in supervised summer research has grown by about 26 percent, thanks in part to 20 new endowed and expendable funds established by foundations, alumni and other donors. The funding is critical to the program, permitting students of all income levels to take part without sacrificing summer income.

Economics Professor Michael Steinberger, who worked with Huynh last summer, says the grants “help brilliant students, like Johnny, to spend the summer producing high-quality research. Instead of trying to find time to research while working another job, Johnny was able to focus entirely on our project. He learned a lot about the process of research, and I learned some new econometric techniques while working with him.”

While much of the research was conducted on campus, students also traveled across the country to work in labs at Tufts University in Boston and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and to conduct research in 14 countries, including Sweden, India, China and Chile.

In September, students lined Stover Walk to present the results of their research to the College community at the 26th annual SURP poster conference. For some of these students, their projects will develop into senior theses or continue on as the basis for co-authored papers with faculty and presentations at local and national conferences.

“Johnny’s supported summer research will be essential to help him get into a high-tier graduate school,” says Steinberger. “I expect our project will place in a top journal, and I’m excited for the real-world policy implications of our findings.”

Coffee with Conscience

November 6, 2013 by Brenda Bolinger Comments Off

nikki

Sociologist Nicki Lisa Cole ’02 carries around an accordion file stuffed with empty, flattened coffee bags she has collected from cafes across the U.S. over the last several years. Each item in her collection, begun when a package of coffee at Starbucks caught her eye, bears imagery or prose that hints at the ethical considerations behind the beans’ journey across the world and into your cup.

As the labels pile up, it’s a lot of information for Cole to parse. And so it is for everyday coffee-drinkers as well. With so many coffee-with-a-conscience practices operating—fair trade, direct trade, organic, shade grown, bird friendly—understanding the different approaches to ethically-sourced coffee, each with pros and cons, would seem to require pursuing dissertation-level research on the topic.

Cole did just that. She became so fascinated with the messages being sent to consumers about ethically marketed or produced coffee that the issue came to drive her doctoral research. Now a lecturer in sociology at Pomona, Cole writes blog posts (21centurynomad. com) on coffee sourcing that are broadly followed, and her expertise has been sought by The Nation, Conducive Magazine and others.

As part of her Ph.D. research, Cole queried 230 coffee drinkers, all of whom identified themselves as regular consumers of some kind of ethically-produced coffee. “Uniformly, people have a very vague, surface-level knowledge of what’s going on,” says Cole. “They tend to recognize the fair trade label, for instance, and know it stands for something good, but most have not done much research.”

With this hazy awareness, the heart of the matter can get lost. Cole wants to remind us why ethical sourcing for coffee is necessary. The reasons include historically low prices that make life a struggle for small producers, fluctuating prices because coffee is traded on the commodities market and price gouging of small producers by large transnational buyers.

So what can coffee drinkers do?

No system is perfect, but Cole says ethical coffee practices do, in fact, make some positive differences around the world. And so her one cup of coffee and one double espresso per day is always fair trade or direct trade. “While I have critiques of all the models out there, I always advocate for picking one that resonates with you and going with it, because it’s better than not,” she says.

The first step: “Ask about the coffee where you buy it: What are the sourcing practices behind this coffee?” Cole says.

The café or coffee shop owner might tell you that they import fair trade certified coffee because they value how the higher price supports community development, or that the certification standards require environmental practices such as minimized use of agrochemicals and water-conserving irrigation systems. Or, you might learn that they happily pay an even higher cost for direct trade coffee (also “relationship coffee”), purchased directly from a grower they trust, as opposed to a cooperative of producers, like in fair trade.

And if they clam up?

“If they can’t tell you what their sourcing practices are, that’s generally a bad sign. It’s probably not the place to get your coffee,” says Cole, a Pomona sociology major who earned her Ph.D. in the same field from UC Santa Barbara. “Most people in the industry who are using some sort of ethical sourcing are proud ofdoing that and want to share that with you.”

Cole points to the transparency of Portland-based Stumptown Coffee Roasters, which practices the direct-trade approach. “They claim ‘our books are open,’” Cole says. Want to learn exactly what price was paid to what producer practicing what methods? You got it.

But even if your coffee vendor provides evidence of ethical sourcing practices, how do you know which system is best? Cole says that depends on what you value. For example, fair trade certification requires a premium be paid on top of the minimum price per pound, which is then used to help workers, farmers and their families through such projects as school improvements, student scholarship provisions or the establishment and maintenance of healthcare clinics. The direct trade model does not provide for this kind of community betterment, according to Cole.

On the other hand, Cole notes, the democratic structure of fair trade cooperatives, where leadership constantly rotates, makes it difficult for buyers to nurture long-term, trusting relationships with producers. Since direct-trade buyers work directly with producers instead of cooperatives, it’s possible to cultivate close, symbiotic relationships in which both parties benefit—buyers pay a higher price for the assurance of high quality coffee, which in turn affords growers a higher level of economic stability.

Also worth considering is Fair Trade USA’s 2012 split from Fair Trade International for the explicit purpose of including large-scale plantations in the fair trade system. When the decision was made, Cole stirred up quite a bit of discussion by declaring “Fair Trade is dead” on her blog, referring to the ramifications of this decision. She still has plenty to say on the matter: “I fear that it’s very bad for small producers, squeezing them out of a market that was supposed to be a fair market.”

Fair Trade U.S.A.officials have defended the move as a way to benefit more farmers and workers, and to allow more consumers to buy Fair Trade products. Cole, though, says there is not nearly enough of a market to support current fair trade coffee production, so adding larger plantations will harm existing fair trade producers.

True to her small-is-good approach, Cole frequents the independent Last Drop Café, located in the Claremont Village just a block or two from campus. “We usually talk about coffee, and it’s been interesting learning about her opinions and insights,” says owner Mike Manning. “Her students have definitely learned a lot from her.”

One thing you might be surprised to learn about Cole, considering the depth of her knowledge and the hundreds of coffee shops she’s visited over the years: She is not a voracious coffee drinker. She is definitely a fan, but has reduced her consumption in consideration of the intense physical efforts that go into cultivating, harvesting and processing coffee beans.

Cole says choosing the higher-priced fair or direct trade coffee, but consuming less coffee overall, is one way to make a difference: “If we change our orientation to the value of goods and to respecting the labor that goes into them, paying a truly fair and just price for those goods, we would see different conditions.”

Caring in the Wild

November 6, 2013 by Daniel Gould Comments Off

Starting this June, Nikki Becich ’13 launched into a year-long journey to pursue her passion for conservation medicine. Over the summer, Becich cared for injured birds at the hospital of the National Aviary, before venturing out on a career-building trip to work and learn at wildlife centers throughout Latin America.

FINDING HER PASSION
Becich had several jobs and internships in zoo and avian medicine under her belt by the time she graduated. She knew she wanted more experience, and found a great match in the National Aviary, an indoor zoo home to more than 500 birds in Pittsburgh, Penn., and where she first volunteered in middle school.

At the Aviary, Becich worked with the center’s two veterinarians as a hospital intern. She helped them with surgeries, medications and daily caretaking, looking after birds brought in from the wild along with the zoo’s regular residents on exhibit.

Becich went into the internship with a focus on treating captive animals, particularly species that are endangered or extinct in the wild. Looking back, she says the experience inspired her to consider the bigger issue of environmental protection.

birdhold GETTING THE BIG PICTURE
Knowing she needed more hands-on training, Becich spent part of her senior year mapping out a trip to practice wildlife care at nature preserves in Central and South America. After graduation, she set off.

“I planned out the trip to apply for the Watson Fellowship, and when I didn`t get that, I decided to blow my savings and do it anyway, because it`s incredibly important for my future career to work and learn abroad,” she explains.

Becich started the first leg of her trek in September as a volunteer at an ecological center in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador. She also is pitching in at Bioparque Amaru Zoo, developing preventative medicine protocols for a new veterinary clinic. In coming months she will intern at wildlife sanctuaries in Peru and Guatemala, helping to rehabilitate injured animals and promote local conservation projects. Becich says her connections from earlier programs were essential in helping her network and make contacts overseas.

She aims to learn first-hand how communities and organizations in the region are coping with threats like oil drilling, which, she says, can contribute to pollution and deforestation. “Meeting real people and seeing for myself what is happening has been extremely informative, but an emotional roller coaster,” Becich says, speaking from Ecuador. “What’s encouraging to see is how there is still protected forest here. We have time. We need serious action, though, and fast, if it`s going to survive.”

THE PATH FROM POMONA
A biology major, Becich mentions Professor Nina Karnovsky as an important mentor who “encouraged me to pursue my love for birds and go after work in conservation.“ She also points to the influence of her semester abroad in a tropical ecology program in Costa Rica, which shifted her focus toward environmental protection.

At Pomona, Becich explored her interests in other parts of the community. She got involved in caring for chickens at the Organic Farm, even raising a few chicks in her dorm in Harwood one year until they were ready to join the flock.

Becich is already looking ahead to her vision of combining medical practice with international research in ecology, with plans to attend veterinary school in the U.S. “I really came into my life’s passion this summer. I am so excited to be here doing what I am doing, and I am so grateful to Pomona for helping to get me there.”

Letter box

November 6, 2013 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

What’s Behind Walker Wall?

I am writing regarding the history of Walker Wall found on the College’s website. That article reports that the wall “remained unadorned until the spring of 1975, when several students painted ‘Free Angela’ on its inner surface, referring to the imprisonment of Black Panther and Communist Party activist Angela Davis after her conviction on murder conspiracy charges.”

As I recall it, Walker Wall comments started two years earlier, during the 1972-73 school year.

My recollection is that one night just before Founders Day someone spray-painted a phrase on Walker Wall near the pass-through to go toward Honnold Library. The phrase was not particularly clever or political, but it was potentially offensive, perhaps scatological. I was an R.A. for Clark V that year and knew that maintenance would not be able to do anything before alumni were on campus, but I did have access to painting supplies from Zeta Chi Sigma, my fraternity. Betsy Daub ’74, also in Zeta Chi Sigma, allowed herself to be enlisted and our quest became covering over the offending text. We used rollers and white paint to neatly block out the graffiti.

What happened next is somewhat lost to me. Somehow we wound up adding our own phrase on the white surface we had created. As I recall, we had each been considered as possible members of the Mufti crew, and in that spirit we came up with the phrase “Veni, Vidi, Vino” and signed it in some way. That comment stayed for some time and others followed. Although I knew several members of the Pomona administration fairly well, I don’t remember any discussion about the wall, and I don’t think Betsy or I was ever questioned about it.

—Jo Ruprecht ’73
Las Cruces, N.M.

Case for the Liberal Arts

President David Oxtoby’s Aug. 7 letter, directed to alumni of the College, brings up the perennial question “Is liberal arts education still relevant in today’s world?” This question requires a perennial answer: Soon after my graduation from Pomona, I found myself locked into a career in engineering, despite the fact that most of my education had been in art and the humanities. Yet that liberal education proved to be relevant in my unexpected career path. If monetary reward is the main goal, and sadly that is often the case, then one is likely to miss the practical benefits of a liberal arts education, as well as the enrichment of one’s quality of life.

“Liberal education” asks more questions than it answers. This can provide some valuable mental equipment, for answers often become obsolete with time. But if the habits acquired in looking for answers remain with you, and the habit of recognizing analogies is developed, you will have acquired a transferable ability which, unlike rigid collections of facts, can go on helping you generate answers to problems in any field.

—Chris Andrews ’50
Sequim, Wash.

All-Star Mistake?

I have to hand it to you. The “Who Did You Get?” article and trading cards in the Summer 2013 edition of PCM are, perhaps, the most offensive thing I have ever seen in the magazine since I graduated in 1972. Quite an achievement.

Please understand, I am not denigrating the achievements of those honored; their accomplishments are noteworthy and deserve praise—but not by implying (if not actually stating) that all the rest of us just don’t measure up.

Not really worthy of calling Pomona their alma mater, and pretty much beneath the College’s concern. Whether you realized it or not—and my sincere hope is that you didn’t—elevating a few graduates to “Pomona All-Star” status relegates the rest of us to just being average. Banjo hitters. Utility players. Minor leaguers. Barely above the Mendoza Line.

That is not how I like to think my college views me. And yet, there it is. At least you deigned to give us the privilege of “round[ing] up a few of [our] Pomona pals” so we can presumably trade cards. I can hardly wait.

Maybe in the Fall 2013 issue you can identify the biggest donors so far in 2013, and the amounts they’ve given. “Who’s gonna come out on top?” “How much did he/she give?” “Can you believe that [fill in the blank] isn’t on the list?” Now I’ll bet that would be a competition the College could really get behind!

—G. Emmett Rait, Jr. ’72
Irvine, Calif.

Baseball and Bytes

Your article on Don Daglow ’74 and his contributions to computer baseball could have been written, without many changes, about me—if I had just been born a few years earlier. Like Don, I loved the All-Star Baseball board game and was an English major. I wrote my first All- Star Baseball simulation using punch cards on an IBM 1620 in my sophomore year of high school in 1974—just three years too late to gain immortal fame!

I also applied at Mattel to work on Intellivision, but here our paths diverge, for alas, I was not hired. However, my All-Star Baseball game did have one last gasp of life—if you can find an ultra-rare copy of Designing Apple Games with Pizzazz (Datamost, 1985), you’ll find a whole chapter, with source code, devoted to a game called Database-ball.

—John “Max” Ruffner ’81
North Hollywood, Calif.

Fraternity Memories

The letter from Leno Zambrano ’51 in the summer issue of PCM surprised me. I knew Leno as a classmate but I had no clue he was homosexual. I have no recollection of Leno seeking membership in the KD fraternity, of which I was president in the spring of 1951. Not all the men at Pomona in those days felt the need to join a fraternity. Some of them were former members of the military and were beyond the need to join a social fraternity. I don’t know if we had any homosexuals among our KD members at that time, but if we did, they kept it to themselves. We had no policy against homosexuals, per se, in our fraternity mainly because it was never one of the factors we discussed during our consideration of prospective members.

—Ivan P. Colburn ’51
Pasadena, Calif.

I was dismayed to learn from the letter by Don Nimmo ’87 in the summer issue that the fraternity/community Zeta Chi Sigma has ceased to exist. When did this happen, and why? I joined Zeta Chi in my sophomore year—freshmen were not permitted to join frats in those days—and my membership was a significant part of the college experience for me, and not only because of playing pool or watching College Bowl every Sunday. I’ve mentioned Don’s letter to other alumni from that era and am assured that I’m not alone in wondering what happened.

—Steve Sherman ’65
Munich, Germany

Alumni and friends are invited to email letters to pcm@pomona.edu or to send them by mail to Pomona College Magazine, 550 North College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Letters are selected for publication based on relevance and interest to our readers and may be edited for length, style and clarity.

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