By Emma Grace Howlett ‘25
Pomona College is part of the Claremont Consortium, or the “5Cs,” meaning that students can enroll in any classes offered by Scripps, Pitzer, Claremont McKenna, or Harvey Mudd College. This opens opportunities to not only engage with a wider variety of courses, but also meet students from other colleges and invest in the wider 5C community.
I have taken advantage of cross-registration by enrolling in courses that are unavailable or often full at Pomona. For example, I decided to take Calculus at Scripps College. I have also taken art classes, gaining access to studio spaces unique to the colleges they are offered at. In “Workshop in Hand Press Printing” at Harvey Mudd, I learned how to design and create artist prints on 19th-century iron hand presses. I learned how to type-set with different fonts, how to bind my text into a block, and finally how to set the block into a press to produce a print using artist-quality paper and ink. For my final project, I carved an illustration into a wood block and printed the text from an original poem. The press I used was from the 1800s and had been imported from Edinburgh, Scotland!
Last semester I took my first ever ceramics class – “Wheel Throwing” at Pitzer. I learned how to throw forms on the wheel, slip and score hand-built decorations, pull handles for my cups, trim the bottoms of my pots, and decorate my objects with slips and glazes. By the end of the course, I could throw cylinders, bowls, tumblers, vases, cups, and mugs. Our final project was a portfolio exchange in which we each made one ceramic object for everyone in the class. The Pitzer Ceramics Studio is spacious and fully stocked with every clay-related tool or machine you could imagine. The collaborative studio environments of art classes help to build productive and creative artistic communities – and also lasting friendships.
I am currently enrolled in a second ceramics class at Pitzer, centering on hand building techniques to produce abstract and conceptual ceramic sculptures. I am excited to discover new ways for my creativity to expand, and grateful I have the chance to take college-level ceramics classes even when Pomona does not offer any. Exploring courses at the other consortium colleges has inspired me to deepen my creativity and curiosity, be open-minded, build community, and capitalize on the opportunities before me.