Is Pomona College right for me?

AsleepAtTheWheel
Tue, 20 Oct 2015 04:09:53 +0000

@sdkb01 – You act like “learning for the sake of learning” and being successful professionally are mutually exclusive. Or maybe your comment comes out of a mentality that anyone who strives for success is a future oppressor (member of the 1%). It appears that you’re applying a litmus test regarding the purity of one’s motives, and don’t want Pomona polluted by anyone who aspires to personal success.

I’m an anesthesiologist (one of the career choices that you mention pejoratively) who took enough semester courses of philosophy at a small LAC to graduate as a philosophy major. I took a year off in the middle of college to do community service, not to advance my career, but because I saw a cause that cried out for it. My hospital is the trauma center for a county of a million people, and I’ve done a lot of uncompensated care in the middle of the night for victims of drive-by shootings, drug-related robberies and assaults, etc. – members of the ‘community’ who are given the best of care under the worst of circumstances. So I feel like I’ve done some good. My wife and I are pretty philanthropic, including sizable donations to my old LAC, helping kids attend who otherwise couldn’t afford to. Or maybe you think that scholarship money for financial-need simply falls out of the sky.

So you might want to think a bit more before adopting what appears to be a holier-than-thou attitude about those who aspire to professional success. Some of us who went on to medical, law, and business schools did more ‘learning for the sake of learning’ than those who were there allegedly for that purpose, as they were too busy congratulating themselves on their intellectual and moral purity.