So far, the Pomona writing supplements seem to be the most difficult to tackle. If anyone could give me any insight about structure or any ideas at all, I obviously won’t steal them, just hoping for some inspiration.
I’m really interested in politics and philosophy if that helps. I was considering doing something along the lines of the roles of government or maybe wealth inequality- i know those are very broad and not creative enough though.
Prompt 1: Pomona’s Critical Inquiry course is required of all first-year students, and is designed to be highly interdisciplinary and engaging. Recent class titles include: ‘‘The Politics of Classical Art,’’ ‘‘Seeing Science,’’ and ‘‘The Theatre and Environmental Activism.’’ Imagine you were hired to design and teach a Critical Inquiry course. Describe the title of the class, its contents, and why you chose it.
Prompt 2: Through the Summer Undergraduate Research Program, Pomona provides students up to $4,000 to conduct research with a Pomona professor on any topic in the arts and humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences. Imagine you received one of these grants. What would you research and why is this topic important to you? How would you know if you had been successful in your research?
The Critical Inquiry courses are all fun courses that aren’t really meant to be academic but to get you to think outside the academic box. You’ll be writing papers and having discussions about weird topics where you probably won’t be able to steal half your research from wikipedia, which is the point of the classes. So for prompt 1 pick a topic you personally find interesting and that could be taught mainly through class discussion and explored through writing. Don’t get too heavy, Critical Inquiry courses are meant to be a little light hearted. For instance, one year one of the critical inquiry courses was ‘Can Zombies do Math?’ ( https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/04/10/essay-defense-courses-ask-seemingly-frivolous-questions ) Keep in mind Pomona professors have a wide range of interests so you’re not going to be able to just make something up. For instance, there’s an econ professor at Pomona whose research specialty is income inequality (Michael Steinberger), so if you want to design a course around that put a little research into it.
For Prompt 2 every year Pomona does a summer research presentation day where they line the major walk through the campus quad with posters ranging from biochem to art history. One of my favorites from last year was a summer project on the evolution of girl’s textbooks and how it related to the growth of nationalism in pre-WW2 Japan. There was also a project on mapping an unexplored portion of the genome of lab fruit flies to better standardize strains for research if that’s more your thing. Go to http://www.pomona.edu/research/surp/ and look around to see what other have done. Research projects are a big part of the Pomona experience and even if you don’t do a summer research internship you’ll have to do either a senior thesis or a senior research project appropriate to your major to graduate. Pomona wants to know if you have any research interests/abilities now basically.
Basically, for both prompts the goal is to see if you can come up on your own with some ideas worth exploring. Your ideas don’t have to be in a well defined major - many Pomona students don’t pick a major until sophomore year (and a few put it off until junior year) and many of those even change majors - but you do need to show that you’ve actually got some interesting ideas.