Pomona People - Sara Goldstein

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From swim team to Shakespeare class, Sara Goldstein has already chalked up some amazing Pomona memories -- and she’s only halfway into her undergraduate career.

She wanted the community feeling of a small liberal arts college, and that’s exactly what she got. “I like the undergraduate focus of Pomona,’’ she says. “I like that it’s a smaller school.”

“I’ve become a lot more independent,’’ she adds. “I’ve met a lot of new and different people who have affected my outlook on things.”

She became good friends with her swim team colleagues as they arrived two weeks before the semester began for daily, six-hour training sessions. “The rest of the time we’re either eating or sleeping or all piled on the couch watching a movie,” she says.

“We’re really close,” she says. “It’s been really, really fun.”

Her Shakespeare class’s final project entailed breaking the class into groups to each perform an act in the manner and campus setting of their choice. They wound up performing Hamlet, her favorite. “Six hours of Shakespeare on a Sunday morning,” she says. “It was glorious.”

Academics are rigorous, but have “definitely been as rewarding as it has been challenging,’’ she says. “All my professors have been really accessible, actively accessible.”

“In high school, people would always ask me after a test, ‘what’d you get?, what’d you get?’, which I hated,’’ she says. “But here it’s like an unspoken agreement – people just don’t compare grades. Pomona students are just here for themselves, not to compete.”

She also enjoys the College’s location. She doesn’t have a car, but there’s a Metrolink commuter train station at the edge of campus, allowing her to travel into Los Angeles to see relatives or south to San Diego to visit friends, without needing a car. “I really love the California attitude, especially Southern California,” she says.

“I’ve had just an amazing time here,’’ she says. “I definitely think I made the right decision.”