Hey! I just have a couple of questions about the two schools (as I have been recently offered a spot at both) and hope I can find varying perspectives.
While I’m looking for a challenging environment, I am not looking for a stressful environment and one that will overload me with school work. I think that the semester system at Pomona will live up this expectation more than Stanford’s quarter system, but if you believe that I may be wrong about that let me know! I am very serious about leaving time for out-of-school activities/learning.
Going along with the second question, I am not a good fit for a college that fosters nasty competition between students. From what I have heard I don’t believe that either college has this, but let me know if this isn’t true.
I would also like to mention that I am going to both schools’ admitted students weekends, so if you have any recommendations about how I should to approach them I’m all ears.
I’d also love to hear about people’s personal experience (or if you have links to articles/blogs about this please share them with me).
Have you read the news about Stanford recently? Recent CS grads are TURNING DOWN startup offers of six figure starting salaries and stock proportions worth up to a half a million, which would potentially make them millionaires once the companies grow, to build their own startups/find somewhere else to work where they feel like they fit in. That says something.
Stanford CS grads have options that likely no other undergraduate would have anywhere else in the world.
@AnEpicIndian I am only considering in majoring in CS, and if I had to choose between the two I mentioned right now, I’d probably pick economics. Why do you believe that these kind of stories cannot be true at Pomona though? Is it its lack of alumni connections and close relationship to the tech industry? Or what else did you have in mind when you said that?
I certainly don’t mean to undermine Pomona students/graduates, but it’s very, very hard to beat the education and (what you’ve stated) connections that Stanford offers. You can practically name any job you wish to pursue, and Stanford will give you the bigger boost to get there. This is mainly due to the reputation the school has built as a universally recognized institution and the alumni it has graduated in the past, as well as its selectivity, which serves as an indicator of the intelligence of its attendees.
Do you wanna become an investment banker? Work on Wall Street? Google? Do you want to become a senator? Or even president? The list is endless. But Stanford will do its best to help you get there.
Again, I don’t mean to say that Pomona graduates can’t do any of the above. They certainly can and are definitely some of the most elite students in the workforce.
Go to Stanford.
If you don’t like it, it’ll be muh easier to transfer to Pomona than the other way around.
I just want to say that AnEpicIndian is misinformed. To debunk all of his/her posts as someone who actually turned down Stanford for Pomona (the horror! yes, it happens, and it happens more than you think; at least 5-6 people in each class do so).
The median tech starting salary for a Pomona grad is 95000. The median at Stanford is also around 95000. The mean business/econ salary for a Pomona grad is 64000 (we don’t have business, so most of these people are econ majors). The mean econ salary for a Stanford grad is 65500. Recent Pomona grads have gone to work at Google (the place where the most Pomona alums are, actually), Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Cisco, and more. There may be some exceptional Stanford graduates who start their own start-ups but on the whole the average job offer for CS grads for both schools is virtually the same.
Pomona is extremely prestigious in elite circles and heavily recruited by all of the top companies and graduate schools for CS and economics. You seriously will not be at as much of a disadvantage as AEI makes it out to be. My friends who are going to Harvard and Yale are accessing the same opportunities as my friends at Pomona.
“It will be much easier to transfer to Pomona” Not when the transfer acceptance rate is 2.8%- one of the lowest in the country and when half the spots are gone to community college students due to Pomona’s intent in recruiting them to elite schools.
The truth of the matter is that both Pomona and Stanford are distinguished undergraduate experiences that offer different things, and neither is definitively better than the other for undergrad. If you want a more independent culture, with a heavy emphasis on entrepreneurship and computer science, Stanford will give that to you more than Pomona can. If you want a more interdependent culture, with a tight-knit relationship with your professors and a place that emphasizes more the liberal arts education and a reflective and flexible vibe, Pomona will be the better place. Yes, Stanford has the Structured Liberal Education, but it’s a short term program with an emphasis on literature and philosophy, whereas Pomona’s LAC benefits extend to every department, including the STEM fields. I was seeking the latter and it was easy for me upon visiting to find a certain element of nurture that doesn’t seem to exist in Stanford. Good luck with your choices and be careful of taking seriously any perspective that puts the matter on a black and white scale. The retention rate according to the CDS 2014-2015 was 98.5% for Pomona and 98.45% for Stanford…students rarely transfer from these exceptional schools.
OP, you might like to read this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/l-jay-lemons/the-gold-standard-the-powerful-impact-of-residential_b_4633443.html?
I’m a Stanford alum and always sort of assumed my D would apply to Stanford SCEA. But after she visited Pomona in her junior year, she made it clear that Pomona was her number one choice, basically for the reasons outlined in that article. She was admitted to Pomona ED1 and we’re looking forward to being there on Monday for Admitted Students Day. Obviously you have two great choices and good luck in your decision.
Corinthian, how was admitted students weekend? Im going this weekend, Im so torn! My top 3 each have a little piece of my heart! UCLA, Pomona, and Dartmouth. Im going to dartmouth on the 22nd. Im hoping to go to med school. This has bee the hardest decision of my life…
Admitted Students Day was great fun. I posted about it on the other thread. http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/pomona-college/1754408-admitted-students-visitation-days.html#latest. I don’t really know much about Dartmouth but we toured UCLA. It’s an excellent public university but very different from Pomona. I have a niece who attended UCLA and loved it but my D definitely preferred the LAC setting and the benefits of the Claremont consortium. Like Xiggi said, listen to your heart you’ll quickly know when you do your visits. Come back and let us know what you decide. You and the OP on this thread are fortunate to have wonderful choices.
Having toured Stanford, UCLA, Dartmouth and Pomona with our daughter, and (like Corinthian) just returned from the Pomona admitted students day, here are my (very personal and possibly off-the-mark) impressions:
Stanford: stunning campus, stellar reputation, incredible job opportunities afterwards, but increasingly oriented toward computer science and the tech industry rather than the liberal arts.
UCLA: nice campus, great reputation, but huge and won't provide much hand-holding; plus the UC system isn't in great financial shape right now.
Dartmouth: also a nice campus and a great reputation, but seems intense and rather testosterone driven (strong sports orientation). I preferred Brown among the Northeast schools we visited.
Pomona: the Goldilocks school, in my opinion, with a near-perfect mix of outstanding teachers, small classes, excellent and growing reputation, lovely small campus (but with easy access to the other excellent Claremont schools), and near-perfect weather. Among the four schools, my impression is that Pomona has the most "heart."
The Pomona president made an interesting comment in his welcome talk, which is that you can always go to a large university for grad school (which the vast majority of Pomona grads end up doing), but why not get a real hands-on education as an undergrad?
As for getting the most value out of the Pomona admitted students day, I’d simply recommend attending all of the events, taking as many of the tours and talking to as many of the departments as you have time for (and visiting the organic farm), and just hang out with the other admitted students to get a feel for who your future cohort will be.
You are not alone in this decision. I am a fellow Class of 2019er who just turned down Stanford for Pomona. Although my interests are quite different from yours, I strongly believe that the value of a liberal arts education is universal. Small classes, devoted teachers and a responsive administration are pretty clearly positive things.
Stanford is obviously also an incredible place, but in the end, will you really have a better four years there? I certainly would not have. I urge you to ignore the opinions of others when making your decision. Name recognition certainly matters, but it is not everything. College is more than just a means to an end: It is a destination in and of itself.
My D goes to Pomona. I went to Stanford. Truthfully, she would have gone to Stanford if she had gotten in (deferred EA, then rejected). But she is very happy at Pomona and it is probably a better fit for her very low key personality. She turned down some really good schools (for example Dartmouth) for Pomona.
I have met many of the other Pomona parents - and I can tell you that the percentage of kids who are at Pomona who were rejected by Stanford is ridiculously high. There is a reason for that - Pomona has a Stanford feel to it - but it is smaller (much) and quieter (somewhat). Then again, 40,000 super smart kids are rejected by Stanford every year. It’s not a small club.
The OP has picked a school by now. But the idea that one could pick one over the other based on not getting overloaded with work is pretty funny. Pomona isn’t a super competitive place based on outward behavior, but most of these kids are very motivated and put a lot of internal pressure on themselves to do well.
There are probably fewer than a HANDFUL of students who turned down Stanford to attend a Claremont school, and this without a higher proportion at Pomona. Berkeley might grab 10-12 such students a year, and the number should be way lower at the entire 5C.
Returned recently from a college tour trip that included stops at both Pomona and Stanford. Everyone in my car favored the look and feel of Pomona over Stanford. Son currently favors Pomona over more than a dozen top schools we visited and toured. So do I.
Admittedly, it would be difficult to walk away from a Stanford admission, but I totally get why some students pick Pomona instead. It may be the best college education in America, and, if you like the sun, what’s not to love about the weather?
I was listening to Los Angeles sports radio yesterday. One of the radio personality, Matt Smith, mentioned that he was in Claremont and at Pomona college for his daughter’s high school Lacrosse (or soccer) tournament this past weekend. He said it was his first time at the Claremont colleges and was blown away at how gorgeous it looks. He gave Pomona some free publicity and told the radio audience that PMC was the #1 Liberal Arts school in the country. He admittedly acknowledged that he did not know Pomona is that highly regarded and that it was a beautiful campus. I know it’s superficial of me to think this but I do hope the words gets out more. A lot of the Pomona kids work super hard to get into this school and it would be nice for them to get some recognition by the general public. I have a niece at Stanford and another one that graduated from Dartmouth and they both had Pomona as their top choice out of high school .
I do think that’s slowly happening. The Forbes 2015 top ranking will no doubt have a positive effect in that regard.
But, OTOH, I was talking to a thirty-something graduate of UC Berkeley the other day and mentioned that my son was looking closely at Pomona College. She had no clue what I was talking about and then seemed to be referencing Cal Poly Pomona. I was a little disappointed.