By Adrian Hui ’19
It was the spring of 2014—a normal Saturday in Claremont. The sky was blue, the air brisk. Most had already left high school for break earlier that day, leaving behind me and several others awaiting a later flight home. I had just completed my junior year then, about to embark on a college application journey.
With four hours before I had to leave for my flight, I took my skateboard and started a three-mile ride towards Claremont Village. I had just picked up this mode of transport—an adaptation of a perceived LA culture. I wasn’t looking for a revelation—I just wanted to pass the time. Inevitably, I took a turn one avenue too late. But what felt like a wrong turn in the moment proved to be the right one of a lifetime. It was the turn that took me through Pomona College.
Given the proximity to my high school, I had always known of Pomona College, but no more than any other school. I knew about the small class sizes and liberal arts curriculum, though I didn’t realize how impactful those factors would eventually be in shaping my college experience.
It was beautiful. As I passed Big Bridges and Marston Quad, the environment gave a sense of calm. While every school could promise an environment that promotes learning, not every school provides the right space to facilitate that kind of experience. In that moment, everything felt right to me. Looking back, that was the right instinct, the right decision. Pomona gave me the space to be relentlessly curious, to learn how to solve hard problems, and to discern signal from noise in a world overflowing with it.
Pomona was the perfect playground for the mind. Whereas other schools have one-year core curriculum regardless of major requirements, Pomona’s design is much simpler: take one class from each of the five areas. As someone with no major preferences, I explored a broad range of disciplines within my first year to figure out my academic interests. Despite the range from history to psychology, from music to physics, there was a very strong common theme across all of them: that curiosity was not just tolerated—it was expected. We were taught that writing is often embedded with context and subjective biases, speeches with underlying intentions, and science experiments with uncertainties and sources of error. Nothing should be taken as is. We are supposed to ask, ‘why—and then what?’ Not once, but five times, each time deeper than the last. If there was anything particularly interesting, and there always was, we would collectively investigate the idea further, pushing beyond the boundaries of individual understanding.
It laid the groundwork for a lifelong habit of questioning assumptions and pursuing ideas with relentless curiosity. We live in a world where everything has layers and meaning, and nothing is as perceived. If we want to exercise critical thinking, we must start with an unpolluted pursuit of truths and perspectives, challenging assumptions along the way. Without asking the right questions, we cannot distill the essence of thoughts and intentions. This applies to intellectual pursuits as well. While the world is complicated, there is also a lot of unexplored space and problems yet to be identified. Even with the right questions, however, there needs to be a solid framework to move from an interesting observation to a useful insight.
I chose to double major in physics and economics because I was fascinated by how both the physical and human worlds operated. Physics is a study of the physical world’s behavior, whereas economics is a study of human behavior under various incentive structures. In both cases, we are creating models, isolating the components that matter, staying aware of what might be missing, and insulating from what doesn’t matter. Both constructs follow a similar path: a problem that starts with an observation, followed by investigation, hypothesis formation, model building, testing, and critical review of limitations and sources of error. Distilled to its essence, this roughly translates to the ‘what, why, and how’ of every identified problem. The setup of experiments and discussions helps, of course, but what was remarkable was the access to professors. I had countless late-night office hours with professors, discussing concepts and clarifying thought processes, as they remained available in their offices for drop-in visits. Small class sizes enabled discussion-based learning to explore all the questions and methods to reach the same answer.
Pomona did not just teach me Physics or Economics. It offered me something much more translatable. It taught me a way to think, framing and solving problems that has a long-lasting impact on not just my finance and startup careers, but also my approach to understanding the world around us.
As a side note about insulating from what doesn’t matter, the world today is noisy—too many uninformed, self-compounding herd opinions. We need to actively scope out noise. Pomona instilled a life skill of when and how to speak—and when to just listen. Active scoping requires deep listening to differing opinions. Rather than ignoring them, it’s about prioritizing our limited attention—and avoiding distractions. I can end this thought with an irony: when everything matters a lot, then nothing does. But when nothing matters too much, we can finally focus on what does.
I did not expect a wrong turn to shape me this profoundly. While Pomona enabled my career into finance, the takeaway transcends the post-college chapter of life. It gave me the ability to navigate through hard problems, the foundation to understand and sit with uncertainty, and the mentality to focus and push forward. Pomona was not just a school, but a mindset. It left a framework to approach life with relentless curiosity, problem-solving skills, and focus. Pomona didn’t hand me answers—it handed me better questions. And that, to me, is much more impactful than spoon-fed knowledge.