Spring 2022 at Pomona: Semester in Review

Hey ho, freshman year is over! Here's what I learned in my classes, my non-class experiences and my thoughts on my time at Pomona so far.

Fall 2021 Semester in Review here

Classes

E4: Intro to Engineering Design and Manufacturing

One line summary: I learned how to make things in a machine shop, and entered Harvey Mudd's engineering sphere. Class Postulate

I was planning to not take any STEM classes this semester, then I perm'd into E4 and tacked on Intro to Cognitive Science, and here we are. Intro to Engineering Design and Manufacturing, or E4, is Harvey Mudd's required intro class for engineering majors. The class effectively has two halves: the "design" half and the "manufacturing" half.

The "design" half covered run-of-the-mill design process content, beating students over the head with the same empathize-define-ideate-prototype-test bludgeon that anyone who has ever said the word "design" and their mom has tattoo'd on their eyeballs.

There were some cool readings from a textbook called "Engineering Design: A Project-Based Introduction," which was written by a few Harvey Mudd professors and introduced concepts like specifications, objectives, functions, constraints, metrics, morphological charts, best-of-class charts, so on and so forth. These concepts were useful not necessarily for driving forward design, but for keeping the design process structured and especially communicating it with team members. It's much easier to debate what design solution satisfies a pre-defined objective better, for example, than whether it satisfies all the stakeholders' and users' nebulous needs better.

Thankfully, the readings and process were ultimately secondary to two actual design projects over the time of the course. I didn't get much out of the first project. The second project was fun, both because we had a real client and problem, and because my team was fire. The problem was to...make the makerspace electronics benches look prettier. Ok, kinda boring, but we knocked it out of the park. Following the process, we most definitely overthought the problem at first, thinking about multi-dimensional rail systems, but ultimately came up with a shelf design with a clever wire management system. We built the shelf out of wood that matched the existing table surface and then waxed it, then I bashed out a retractable wire mechanism over two or three days in the machine shop. Kim, the makerspace manager, loved it.

Now we blur into the "manufacturing" half of the course. The bulk of this half were the lab projects. First, making an ocarina out of a PVC pipe and a piece of nylon: mine never worked, but I learned to use a lathe and mill! Then, making a hammer stand, which was just a simple laser-cutting and 3D printing job. The last project was the big one: making a hammer head with much more complex shapes, curves, countersinks, press fits, heat treatments, and sandblasting. It was a lot of fun, and got me much more comfortable working in the machine shop.

I feel like I got two main takeaways from the class. The first was the beginnings of an engineering confidence, the feeling that I can take a problem and design, then build a solution for it. This didn't come from the design process part -- the empathize/define steps I've gotten plenty of practice with from software work, though again I did learn much better how to document and communicate the rest of the process -- but rather from the "manufacturing" experience. Knowing the things I could make quickly in a machine shop dramatically expanded my solution space from the makerspace 3D printing/laser cutting space I had access to before. My peers played a role in this, too: engineering kids who came up with all sorts of slick physical and electronic contraptions for their various projects, a surrounding vibe whatever we needed, we could build, and have a lot of fun doing it too.

The second takeaway was that I got to know the Harvey Mudd engineering sphere. Through my two well-connected Mudder teammates I got to know a bit aobut the engineering sequence, about the harsh grading and workload, about the Mudd prank folklore. Spending a ton of time in the makerspace, machine shop and elsewhere on campus, too, I felt much more comfortable accessing the spaces and resources that made Mudd so good for engineers. By the time I was done with my hammer head I understood why Zook said so few Pomona kids did the 3-2 program: Harvey Mudd had everything I needed to get a great basic engineering education without leaving campus. This class exceeded some of my most optimistic expectations for how much exposure to Harvey Mudd engineering I would get my freshman year.

The question that remains is how much I really care about engineering, or my physics major. I don't think physics, math, cogsci or other science-y topics bring me nearly the amount of joy that more involved humanities work does, but engineering -- like CS and especially NLP elsewhere in my life -- very much straddles the line, and from this class (and Larry's awe at my milled slot?) I find that I'm actually pretty good at and quite enjoy building physical things. I turned down a mechanical engineering internship for the summer but for now I feel good about heading into E79 and maybe E80 next year, and building some shenanigans with Larry. We'll see how it goes!

Hist 62: China, Japan and Korea in the 20th Century

One line summary: I got a sketch of Chinese, Japanese and Korean history since the 1800s, read some cool history papers, learned about Foucault's biopolitics, and saw real examples of what I was learning in my politics class play out. Class Postulate

My friends taking Asian Traditions in the fall made me realize that I could use Pomona classes to connect with my own heritage. This class was an attempt -- a successful one, I think -- to do so.

The class, taught by visiting UCLA professor John Leisure, was a sometimes overwhelming mashup of a survey class of 600 nation-years of history and a higher level history class reading critical papers about that history. Leisure was a Japan researcher himself, which showed in his enthusiastic interludes about how mid-1900s Japanese housing projects were reflections of larger state interests. The class never placed much emphasis on memorizing history. Instead, through weekly "keyword analyses," class discussions and argumentative papers, it firmly pushed us towards engaging critically with history, exploring the different ways that certain histories are framed and analyzed, and the agencies of different actors involved. I enjoyed almost every paper I read, writing summaries of 40 of them in Postulate by the end of the course.

As a result, I remember both the history and the majority of the critical nuances only in broad strokes. The long arcs from Tokugawa to Meiji to East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere to postwar to neoliberal Japan; from Joseon Korea to the Qing invasion to Japanese occupation to postwar division; from imperialist power Qing to opium war/treaty port Qing to Sun Yat-Sen Republican to Chiang Kai-Shek nationalist/Mao CCP to fully Mao CCP to Deng CCP China.

The parts I dove into were, naturally, the parts pertinent to my identity and (nascent? as of yet wishy-washy?) politics: the rise and fall of Maoist China, which I explored in keyword analyses and my second argumentative essay. Maoist land reforms and views of political class were deeply exciting, including to Third World and Western revolutionaries, as the class readings and other prior reading about 60s American radicals' appeals to Maoism showed; but they were challenging to turn into successful practice, as the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution highlighted. After Mao's death Deng undid what I argued was Maoism's key innovation as a state, the biopolitical consideration of political class and equality as a population-level metric.

And oh yeah, biopolitics! Foucault's 1976 lecture on biopolitics was just thrown in as a reading at the end, and it was so exciting that I wrote a blog post about it, the first single-reading-driven blog post I'd written all semester. The key argument is that: as states industrialized, traditional "kill or let live" forms of state power were no longer sufficient for resource extraction. Instead, "biopolitical" "make live or let die" forms of state powre arose, where the state actively managed how its people lived through public housing, public health, education, etc. and measured and manipulated population-level metrics. Foucault goes on to talk about how this necessarily leads to "racism", not of the ethnic variety, but of the generic "us vs. them" variety, whenever the state needs to exert the power to kill again. It was a fascinating extension of the traditional "monopoly on legitimate violence" definition of a state that rang true in general and was useful again in that final paper about Mao and Deng's Chinas.

My two big takeaways from this class:

1. Learning about Chinese history was personally very meaningful.
2. Applying various political science ideas -- nationalism, sovereignty, biopolitics -- helped me understand them a lot better. Taking a critical angle on reading and talking about history, as common as that is at a liberal arts college, was fun, and gave the class a nice rigor.

Poli 5: Intro to Comparative Politics

One line summary: I learned lots of basic political science concepts, read bits and pieces of key theoretical texts and got a sense of what empirical comparative politics -- and empirical social sciences in general -- is like. Class Postulate

Consider a Hobbesian state of the world. Some people get by as farmers. Others become bandits, roving around stealing from farmers, and occassionally from each other.

Eventually some bandits develop a region that they regularly steal from. They cycle through a few villages regularly, and fight off any other bandits who try to steal from those villages. Because the thievery is regular, these farmers can live more predictable lives and spend less resources defending themselves or making emergency plans, so production goes up. The bandits thus make more and grow more powerful. They expand their territory to other villages, driving out previous roving bandits until they decide to fortify their own territory to, and the purely Hobbesian state of freely roving bandits congeals into a tiled map of territorial bandits.

Call the theivery taxation and the bandits states and bam, we have [a theory for how states formed](https://postulate.us/@samsonzhang/poli5/s/2022-02-01-Dictatorship%2C-Democracy%2C-and-Development-(partial-qnbgkXFwFYErQqHJP4VXeE): territorial sovereign states are better at resource extraction and survival than other power structures, so they outcompeted them all and became the dominant power structure across the world. Look at historical competition between territorial sovereign states, city-states and city-leagues and now you've empirically validated and fleshed out the theory.

This theory-empirical study pattern made up the class content. Both parts were fascinating.

Theory-wise, we covered discussion of the meaning of concepts like states (centralized political entity with monopoly on legitimate violence in a given territory), what makes states strong (war, "social disciplining"), nations (large group of non-genetically related people with a claim to a common history and territorial homeland who aspire to self-governance), democracies (political structures were public officials are held accountable to the public, with various more specific definitions), different types of them (Westminster/parliamentary, proportional/consensus, presidential), what brings about or maintains them (modernization, actually not modernization, civic society, not natural resources), the effects of colonialism (underdevelopment, weak postcolonial states), and more.

I had long wanted to take in a bunch of these ideas, which all the debate and MUN kids already seemed to know, and now I've been blasted with them. But I was also surprised by the empirical rigor of a lot of the papers. Does modernization lead to democracy? Let's collect a ton of data and run about five hundred regression analyses to find out!



Source for above

What previously seemed like a wishy-washy collection of theories that one simply had to stumble through to figure out appeared to me after this class as something actually a lot closer to physics: a collection of models, none of them comprehensive, many frequently overlapping, some supported by evidence, taken as true and useful until disproven. This realization applied to fields like econ (econometrics!), sociology and other social sciences too.

So all in all, a class that I learned a lot from. And taking it with half my friend group was fun!

LGCS 11: Intro to Cognitive Science

One line summary: I got a shallow overview of what the field of cognitive science is like. Class Postulate

I didn't like this class. Lectures were okay, but readings were shallow and pop science-y. Class success depended in large part on memorization-based tests, and left me not wanting to go any deeper into cognitive science.

Ignoring the class, though, my dominant impression of cognitive science as a field is that it's a very nascent one. Research papers positing models for certain behaviors bounce around like crazy between different theoretical foundations -- abstract cognition models and neurological explanations of all sorts -- and frequently disagree, with acknowledgement on both sides that there isn't sufficient evidence to say one way or another. It's hard to get a sense of what is generalizable and what's not, and why.

Nevertheless it was interesting to learn about some counterintuitive truths about how consciousness (through pathways parallel to, not encompassing, unconscious ones), attention and perception work. Due to both the class style and content, I didn't get very into it, but now I know!

Future classes

This past year I've taken intro Media Studies, Comparative Politics, Cognitive Science, Physics, Math and Engineering classes, and a few History electives. From the classes a splattering of lenses for understanding and engaging with the world have emerged.

Physics, cognitive science and comparative politics offered surprisingly similar lenses combining creative theory-making with experimental or empirical analysis striving for rigor -- the general scientific method that I'm guessing will keep coming up in the future wherever I look. Engineering, at least the E4/undergrads messing around variety, was an exhilarating build fast fail fast environment that I love and want to keep exploring, including the more rigorous, technical and specialized parts of it. Outside of classes journalism and mock trial represented a more practical real-world communication lens, which I'll talk about later.

I want to further explore Media/Culture Studies -- it's my major, after all, the driving reason I came to Pomona in the first place. I want to read more theory and get a sense of how the discipline views the world -- I'm excited to take Powers of Pleasrue next semester. I also want to get a sense of the discipline's knowledge discovery and creation methodology. Text analysis is a standard one that I've been taught since elementary school English classes. I want to learn more about ethnography and anthropology research techniques, an interest heightened by reading Reia's StoryMap and learning about Jasper's thesis. In addition to media studies classes, then, I'm hoping to take an intro anthropology class next semester. PERMs away!

So all in all, another fruitful academic semester doing exactly the kind of academic exploration I came here for. Better understanding of academic disciplines achieved, one subject rejected from further pursuit.

not classes

...but of course I'm here for more than classes. Here are clubs, people and other things that were meaningful to me this semester.

Mock Trial was fun!

In the fall I talked about the mental toughness that I built in mock trial. In the spring I was stacked as a double witness on our competitive A team, both due to my performances as an alcoholic and fire expert in the fall (which scored team points, won me awards and was fun as hell) and because "we didn't have anyone else," Isha later said.

Being on a better team and playing relatively easy witnesses meant that we took far fewer L's, at least ones that were my fault, and the mental toughness I mentioned in the fall was tested much less. I spent my time absorbing Clay's "big and dumb" style of directs and demos and felt pretty good about it by the final Khan direct we made together. I hard prep'd a whole package for Syed with Eloisa, only to not actually run it a single time in competition -- but that let my, Isha, Meg and Ashley's Jelani/Tom Cruise demo shine.

Unexpectedly it reminded me of journalism: both were about taking in lots of information about complex issues, and then communicating a distilled form that a layperson could understand in a very short amount of time, operating within an apparently rigid code of operation (rules of evidence on the one hand, journalistic standards and ethics on the other). Ultimately the decider of what happens is not what narrative is truer or fairer, but what is told in a way that is received better, as the overlayed real trials of Kyle Rittenhouse and Amber Heard underscored.

After the fall I wasn't sure whether to continue doing mock trial next year. Nothing in the spring season pushed me obviously one way or another. But in the A team post-season party in Meg's room and on senior night, hearing the long-time members' stories of getting to know each other over the years, Eloisa asking me to captain with her, the promised adventure of in-person competition and travel in the future... a big reason I auditioned for the mock trial team in the first place was to be part of a team, have great times with a group of people, and that's the reason I'll be continuing!



Tidy Tuesday got me comfortable with CSVs

It started with Xuehuai telling me to go to an Estella classroom between classes on Tuesdays, where I made some d3 graphs from a big CSV of data.

It ended with me spending a weekend at UCLA with Xuehuai and Saatvik, winning the runners-up award at a competition with over 500 students competing.

It started with me cursing at pandas and making simple maps in d3. It ended with me running 1.4 GB data files through Jupyter notebooks, training clustering models and spitting out CSVs to swap with teammates, pulling together SVGs and hand-drawings in Figma minutes before the deadline.

Doing Tidy Tuesday and then DataFest with Prof. Hardin felt like the equivalent of the lab component of a statistics and data visualization class custom-tailored for my existing skillset. I've never gained more data handling and visualization skills in such a short amount of time, and of course had fun learning new things, traveling new places and meeting new people while doing so.



TSL drove my growth as a journalist -- and convinced me I wanted to quit student journalism

TSL took up all of my time this semester. Not in the sense that I literally didn't do anything else, but in the sense that every crack of time, of attention, of mindspace that was otherwise free seemed to be taken up by TSL.

This was not an unfamiliar feeling. Working on The Phillipian had been the same: as soon as you become an editor or otherwise really become part of the newsroom, your teeth become enmeshed in the ever-turning cogs of the weekly production machine: every friction-induced slowdown, every bit of slack you allow will immediately be repaid by a slam back into motion. I thought that being an associate editor might spare me from this fate, and if I followed Jenna and Siena's expectations for what associate editors did I might have escaped it, but with my tendency to dive into challenges and projects of course this was not to be.

I grew a lot as a journalist through TSL this semester. As being a staff writer in the fall finally gave me a sense for how ledes, WWWWWHs, quotes and a hundred other parts of news stories are made, being an editor gave me a sense for how the news more generally is made, from pitch to assignment to editing to publishing to promotion. Regarding how TSL worked, I bounced between being deeply impressed -- at the dedication of its writers, the consistent quality of its content and web and social media promotion -- and disappointed -- by the way that drafts and editing would regularly be days late, opportunities for writers to grow squashed by complacent or burned-out editors.

Being in control of assignments and editing timelines also gave me a lot of leeway to play with data pieces, too. At times definitely a bit too much, as pieces dragged days and weeks behind original deadlines. But I steadily improved my d3/Idyll skills, producing yet another admissions data visualization -- this time animated! -- and won a Best Interactive Graphic award for my fall datavis and contributed to a Best COVID Coverage award with my COVID portal.

For a story on endowments with Ava I discovered the financial statements each 5C school publishes; when an assignment about tuition increases came up, I jumped on the opportunity to do a deep dive into the school's spending and revenue sources. The project was ambitiously but poorly managed: without a vision for what the insights or even collected data should look like, exploration dragged on for weeks, past the original deadline, then multiple extensions, then the very last issue of the paper, then the end of the semester altogether, all the way until I was speedily coding scrollers and graphs in Idyll. The piece was finally finished this week, and still caught on just a few bottlenecks before being published.

The end result -- as far as I can tell before it's really "ended" and I've seen how other people have received the piece, anyhow -- is a significant increase in both my skepticism of data pieces and my confidence in producing them. Parsing through the data and interviews gave me much more perspective on how data pieces work: data doesn't explain itself. Interviews and narratives do that. The data pieces I had previously considered shallow and unrigorous now appear prudently balanced and worthy of admiration. Building the actual piece in Idyll and then integrating it with WordPress through a site-specific plugin greatly increased my technical proficiency working with both Idyll/d3/Recharts and WordPress.

Data journalism aside, I also jumped in on two last-minute filler stories, a COVID breaker and a huge piece on the effects of the war in Ukraine. The last made it into my clips portfolio.

These hard-skill journalism experiences are undoubtedly and immeasurably beneficial to my journalism career, helping me get into AAJA VOICES and hopefully through further involvement with The Yappie and other publications. I'm equally thankful for are the multifaceted relationships I got out of it. Reia and Jasper are my anthro advisors as well as an intellectual/cooking friend and roommate, respectively. Rya, Jenna and others are now fellow student journalists I know farther along their careers. It was exciting to see Katherine join the fray! And all the others I didn't mention here.

Ultimately I think this semester's experiences showed me that I want to move beyond student journalism, though. Maybe that's short-sighted of me? Omar from VOICES had a lot of love for his student paper (at Cal Poly!). For me it boils down to the feeling that I had so much more time to do the things that I wanted and be the person that I wanted after the last TSL issue came out. Being a journalist necessitates filling your attention with your subject matter, your constituent community, to some extent, but the TSL angle on campus, with all the different club and student and faculty concerns, isn't what I want filling my attention. There are countless other ways to engage with the campus community -- AAMP, prisab, CSWA, SJP -- and I felt like I was missing out on them when fully committed to TSL. As a journalist, I also have new opportunities at The Yappie, AAJA Voices and elsewhere.

In primary source documents:

April 28: TSL is a rabbithole, but I'm not opposed to rabbitholes -- I just don't want to rabbithole into school admin issues and spend all my energy understanding their nuances

Today Shawna presented two story pitches in Slack. One of them was about media coverage of anti-Asian police brutality and Black-Asian solidarity. I jumped at the opportunity to take it. These are the kind of things I want to be rabbitholing into. Media trends. California immigration law. Activists working against deportation.

So at least for next semester, I feel good about saying goodbye to the Walker newsroom.

The Yappie showed me what real journalism is like

The Yappie is a non-profit, volunteer (hopefully not for much longer!) AAPI political publication that I've been contributing to for about a year now.

My main involvement with The Yappie this semester was working on a longform piece on the deportation of Southeast Asians in California with Katelyn that came out in May. The piece was funded by a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network, whose thesis is that journalism presently fails communities by disproportionately covering problems in the world. They push journalists to instead write "solutions" pieces that balance reporting on problems with emphasis on efforts to create solutions to these problems, with analyses of the impact, limitations, and potentially transferrable insights of these solutions.

Through working on the story I became a better interviewer, writer, fact-checker and more, but more importantly the story felt important and real. APSC and VietRISE went on to share the article as part of their VISION Act campaigns, and it seems the story will serve as a meaningful resource for activists and advocacy groups going forwards. Working on the story felt grounded and meaningful in a way that most other stories I've written haven't, and reminded me of the excitement about the impact of news publications in the communities they served that first pulled me into journalism through my high school paper.

The activists and campaigns themselves were also the clearest example I've come across of radically local changemaking. If immigration reform is deadlocked at the federal level, then there's no time to waste in pushing to protect formerly incarcerated immigrants at the state level, where effective policy can actually be pressured into place. Indeed, it's local changes and campaigns that drive federal reforms, not the way other way around, SEARAC national policy director Kham Moua told me. (Milly's words have echoed in my head since my conversation with her in the fall: "Your positionality, experiences, and worldview limit the change you can cause. You always need to start there.")

The rest of The Yappie's editorial production slowed down as its leadership dealt with incorporation, the SJN project (with two other major pieces) and burnout. Javan and I interviewed Kylie Taitano, a software engineer and political organizer who ran for a San Diego Congress seat, with The Yappie published in a profile a few days before she lost her primary. I helped with last-minute stories about the SF school board recall in February and the signing of a national bill starting the long process of potentially creating a National APA History and Culture museum.

At one point Dan reached out to talk about team and payment structures post-incorporation, and in a Harvey Mudd conference room I leapt into helping draft the operations proposals that would eventually lead to story pay rates and Deputy Editor positions.

Overall, The Yappie remains one of the most valuable and exciting things I'm part of. There's plenty of uncertainty and sometimes frustration about how its run, but I'm constantly inspired by the people I get to work with and the work that we do. It's an amazing platform for my growth as a journalist and personally.

Visiting Finland gave me perspective on my identity and rekindled my love of piano



My first-ever trip to Europe came rather unexpectedly. After an Instagram story and an Omicron spike, I found myself lugging a suitcase through the gravel- and slush-filled streets of Helsinki. On the trip I came to appreciate European public transit, the gorgeous public library, and Tsingdao beer, among other things. While waiting for a lens cap to print on Oodi's 3D printer I listened to some Sibelius pieces and fell in love, failing to visit his house but trudging through some thoroughly slushed paths to his monument.

As meeting up with Andover friends in SF in the fall and in Boston and Chicago more recently had been, the trip also left me with a cathartically expanded perspective and senses of appreciation, hope and content joy in my own life. I wrote a few pretty paragraphs in Oodi:

Listening to Sibelius in Oodi after discovering his Reverie in a sheet music book in this very library two days ago: a new desire to pick up piano, a realization that there is so much more to piano than I previously grasped: something so far from Chopin, Beethoven, Liszt that I'm familiar with, even Debussy that Mr. Porter introduced me to, that I've somehow never even thought to explore.

Oh, how narrow-minded of me to center my study of piano on myself, my lack of commitment or discipline or technical ability! What joy there is left to partake in, what other languages to learn, people to meet, foreign yet familiar cold to feel stinging, trams to ride trundling through twisting streets, spires from another half-millenia still saluting the sky…

...

Maybe to grow up is to trade the comfort of unconditional belonging for the view of a world too big for unconditional belonging but only by being so big enough for all the other wonderful lifegiving things, to lose conviction in all you believed so surely to be true in order to discover a kaleidoscopic trove of truths you had never previously conceived possible.

The clearest realization came from a conversation about homesickness on the flight back home. For all the moving around the US I've done I rarely feel homesick, I told Xuehuai: but I felt homesick in Finland, a feeling not so much of not belonging (which of course was also present) but of realization that there were spaces to which I belonged, from which I have longed to escape, and for a week did, only to come bounding back.

I don't feel strongly attached to any place I can call home: I've spent about equal time in upstate New York, New York City, and Andover so far, plus Salt Lake City and San Francisco last year, retaining only relatively isolated connections from each of these places (am I really a New Yorker if I only spent middle school there? an Andover kid if I have almost nobody from my grade to talk to after graduating?). But the trip to Finland -- maybe Allen's celebration of coca-cola as a patriotic American symbol -- made me realize that there was a place and a community I felt strongly about and would long for if away from for a long time: America. America and its language, my language, its arrogance, my arrogance, its Asian American community, my community.

Saying "America is my home" feels a little simplistic, a little hollow. Perhaps it's an aspirational statement more than a descriptive one, an aspiration not towards American nationalism or assimilation but towards the "love for people and for place," in Jimmy Boggs' words, that revolutions are made out of.

Campus continues to provide space for exploration and joy

In the fall my friend helped me do drag for Halloween. This semester, inspired by a few different friends (and my literal model of a Mock Trial teammate/incoming captain), I got comfortable wearing crop tops and tying up shirts, and wearing dresses for both fun and formal events (stealing earrings and makeup from yet more friends). Maybe one day I'll outgrow the urge to run from masculinity but for now I'm enjoying finding confidence and comfort in new ways.

I only discovered that I wasn't in the group chat of my AAMP group after bumping into Lucy at Coop one day, going to two mostly empty meetings after that but really enjoying AAMP snacks, the retreat and the last open mic that Ally performed at. I applied and was selected to be an AAMP mentor for the next year, and I'm looking forward to continuing to be involved with the Asian American community -- and just have fun with friends -- in new ways next year.

Conclusion & looking forwards

In many ways I felt less engaged this semester than last. My academic explorations felt motivated more by an abstract desire for knowledge than an urgent curiosity. Though I gained a lot from TSL, it sapped energy that might have otherwise gone towards more personal writing and building. As I wrote on the last production night of TSL:

In the last few weeks of TSL I've been neglecting my duties but lowkey my life has been a lot better? like I've had time to build threader, write a blog post about Foucault (my intellectual energy came back!) and lots of other stuff. editing can be fun but it's really draining, forces you to focus all of your energy on it (plip flashbacks). more reason to not be an editor next sem!

Nevertheless, it was immensely fruitful. I re-read my reflection from last semester to show how this semester has been lacking, but instead find that this semester has been no less meaningful. In last semester's reflections I wrote about ideological change, joy, working hard, perseverance, embracing my identity, and learning to love writing: in this reflection I wrote about the same. (relevant MIT blog post)

Last sememster -- my first at Pomona -- was about figuring out what Pomona is like, coming out of a gap year in a far-removed environment. This semester I've continued to explore various departments and clubs, but also began to set roots. Returning to Mock Trial means taking ownership of the club, helping mentor a new generation of competitors and carrying on the team's legacy in competition. Being an AAMP mentor will provide opportunities to create and steward campus spaces for dozens of new Pomona students. Continuing my SURP on campus, continuing to do Tidy Tuesday and DataFest, whatever involvement I'll still have with TSL.

So as always, here's to what's next!