Pomona College View Book [pdf]

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Sponsor
Groups
Year the Sponsor
Program originated:
1927
(Beginning in women’s residence
halls, it was expanded to include
men’s dorms in 1950.)
Average percentage of
first-year students who
apply for the 60 sponsor
positions available for
the following year:
35 %
Ask any senior on campus what he or she remembers most about his or her first year on campus
and you’ll probably hear about something called a sponsor group.
A part of the Pomona experience since 1927, sponsor groups are designed to help students make
the transition from home to dorm life. The groups are coed and consist of 10 to 20 first-year
students who live in adjacent rooms in the residence halls, along with
two sophomore sponsors who help them learn the ropes of campus
life—from joining a club and buying books to finding out where to
get the best pizza in Claremont or how to get into Los Angeles
without driving (it can be done).
“A sponsor is someone you can rely on,” says junior Tiamaht
Erickson from Portland, Oregon, one of the three head sponsors
who supervise the program. “For some students, we can be a big
brother or sister; for others, a friend. It’s different for everyone. I
come from a really big family, so the idea of having a kind of built-in
family was one of the things that attracted me to Pomona. My
sponsor group was my home base. I’d go to class, work out with the
track team and come back and know there were people at the dorm I
could have a meal with or just hang out with and relax.”
Members of your sponsor group may become some of your closest
friends. We know of connections that have lasted long after
graduation, with sponsor groups getting together at alumni
reunions. That doesn’t happen for everyone, but for most, the firstyear
program provides a built-in support group—people with whom
to talk, to procrastinate, to plan, to let off steam, to share a latenight
snack.
“We have a range of interests—pre-med, econ, media studies,” says
first-year Dante Benson of Camden, New Jersey. “Some of us play
sports, one of us is president of the freshman class. We sometimes eat
lunch and dinner together, but we always gather from 11 to 3 in the morning to talk, and usually end
up ordering a pizza or some Thai food. I guess you could say we’re the laid-back, late-night group.”
Sponsors undergo intensive training and work closely with the resident advisors, as well as
members of other Pomona College support groups including five mentor programs—Asian American
Mentor Program (AAMP), Chicano/Latino Student Affairs (CLSA), Ujima (run by the Office of
Black Student Affairs), Queer, Questioning and Allied Mentoring Program (QQAMP) and the
Jewish Mentor Program (JMP).
www.pomona.edu/admissions
➢ As the Princeton Review said recently, “Students at Pomona have got a
good thing going, and they know it. In fact, residential life at Pomona is so
amazing that some of the administrators ‘even live in the dorms!’ Surrounded
by ‘the mountains, the beach,’ and other ‘natural locales’ at Pomona, you can
‘spend time at the beach and go skiing in the mountains on the same day.’”
The publication has also consistently listed Pomona among the nation’s
top colleges in the category evocatively titled “Dorms Like Palaces.” Though
that phrase may be a bit of
an exaggeration, our
residence halls must be
doing something right.
On-campus housing is
guaranteed to any student
who requests it, and about
98 percent of Pomona
students choose to live
there. Pomona’s 14
residence halls range in size
from about 60 to 300
students, with most
housing 120-150. All are
coed, and more than twothirds
of the rooms are
singles. Each building has one or more resident advisors—students who live
in the hall and serve as administrative liaisons.
First-year students are grouped into small sponsor groups, each mentored
by two sophomores, and housed in six residential halls on South Campus.
Oldenborg Center is home to 140 students—most in their second year—
including those who live in its six language halls. North Campus has housing
for sophomores, juniors and seniors.➣
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