By Balan Selvamurthukumaran ’27
I spend at least a few hours every week at Carnegie Hall, something that has not changed since I came to Pomona College. When I decided to attend Pomona, I knew that this would be the case. I sat-in on a seminar at Carnegie Hall during admitted students’ day, took my first class and exam in Carnegie Hall, so on and so forth. As an economics major—and someone that considered studying International Relations or Politics on the side—I figured I would be in Carnegie all the time. In fact, when I started college, I hardly ever left the place (this is a joke), even heading over there to study when classes were over.
I think part of the appeal—especially then—was that Carnegie was just so different. Carnegie looks nothing like most buildings at Pomona College. It is no laidback affair with red-tiled roofs; it is an eye-catching monolith reminiscent of the Acropolis with great pillars standing in testament to the utter dominance of the Pomona College Economic Department (I’m sure my professors would agree). I am an economics major, and Carnegie was beautiful—why wouldn’t I spend time there?
My second semester, however, I had no classes in Carnegie. I chose to spend time in the economics library, however, spending my time working on projects and playing with statistics (for an econ class—the rare one not taught in Carnegie). This was a curse, eventually—as I struggled to wrangle the necessary data to finish my analysis— I began dreading setting foot in the Carnegie economics library. It was only grudgingly that I returned the following semester, for a politics class (I was done with economics, then). This time, I was especially frustrated by the downsides of sitting around in Carnegie. The classrooms, for example—the small desks attached to the chairs were incredibly small, and not nearly sizable enough to accommodate a laptop and notebook. This class wasn’t nearly as difficult as my previous one, however, and I began to drift back to Carnegie.
As a second-semester sophomore, I have concluded that I will never leave Carnegie. I will most certainly have classes at Carnegie in the fall, and I will surely spend plenty of my free time churning out economics problems on slightly-too-small desks. However, I do not dread this. At the end of the day, it is Carnegie.
