The Southern California A Cappella Music Festival is Coming! SCAMfest, presented by our own Claremont Shades, will be Friday, Nov. 6th, 7:30 pm in Big Bridges Auditorium. Come see performances by the USC SoCal VoCals, USC's Reverse Osmosis, UCLA ScatterTones, among others. Stay for the after party in Pomona's Clark I courtyard from 10 pm to 1 am. Tickets are on sale for $5 in dining halls, ASPC office, and the Gold Student Center, or get them at the door for $8.
Pitzer kids are a big presence in these groups, especially the Shades, which includes:
Malcolm Miller '10, President of the Claremont Shades, Baritone
Kylene Ramos '12, Vice President of the Claremont Shades, Alto
Stanley Berrin '10, Vocal Percussionist
Paul Bergmann '11, Bass
Josh Cohen '12, Bass
Claire Berkman '12, Soprano
Murphy Miller '12, Tenor
Honestly, to watch it live is 10 times better than the videos- last SCAMfest was one of my favorite events of the fall. Don't miss this!
The Orange Peel revival seems to be steaming ahead! Last fall the Peel put out 2 issues but died when many juniors went abroad in the spring. They're meeting tonight at 5 pm in GSC 108, if you want to join in. I'm going to try to make it there myself and see what they're up to.
I must admit that I hold a grudge against the Orange Peel since nobody liked my suggestion that it be called "Orange You Glad Pitzer Got a Newspaper?" Still, I think Pitzer would benefit from at LEAST 2 student-generated media outlets, and I wish them the best of luck!
From editor emeritus Ben Alpert '10:
The Orange Peel Mission Statement
The Orange Peel has been established by students for the Pitzer community as a means to effectively disseminate information on campus affairs. It is a medium to promote community awareness through committed, responsible student reporting. It pledges to report in a manner consistent with the 5 Pitzer values of community, diversity, dialogue, inquiry, and action. The Peel is committed to responsible, accurate, objective reporting without biases and promises equal, fair assessments on reported issues.
As a voice for the Pitzer community, the Peel will serve as a written record of club activities and commitments, a means to facilitate dialogue through thorough research, and an outlet to explore the lesser known aspects, elements, and overlooked accomplishments of the college, its students, and its faculty.
Fareed Zakaria asked to hear from a woman in the audience -- after several of the questions came from men. Not only is this a stupid policy -- more women go to college now than men and its increasing -- but it's really against the spirit of the Athenaeum, notwithstanding the "diversity questioning" that Gann did a few years ago at Clinton where every question was asked by someone of a different race.
That this response from Zakaria encouraged audience applause strikes me as disappointing, to say the least.
The young woman is of course SAC member and MUN veteran Elena Fanjul-Debnam '10.
Charles goes way overboard in his analysis of what happened: Asking to hear from a woman in the audience isn't a policy, it's just something Zakaria did. Does anyone really think he set out speaking with the intention of hearing from at least one female? I doubt it.
More likely is that Zakaria noticed the lack of female presence or participation, was surprised by it, and wanted to make a point that females can contribute to the conversation. At a college with notoriously male-dominated campus culture, it's a good point to make. But it's not a policy or a quota. Maybe the audience clapped because it was a good question.
Turns out today was the 3rd annual “Mt. Baldy Speedo Hike” for On the Loose, the outdoor club of the Claremont Colleges. Speedos (for men) and two piece bathing suits (for women) were mandatory, with mustaches and German accents highly recommended. If I was a shy young student in the Claremont area with an interest in mountains and naked ladies, I would join this club in a heartbeat. In addition to bikini activities, On the Loose organizes a bevy of outdoor trips all over the Southland, with a Death Valley marathon upcoming and hopefully a kegger or two on the horizon as well.
As much fun as it was watching the group tromp up the hill, it was also great sport to watch the reactions of our fellow, more traditionally-attired hikers. Think sudden oasis in the Sahara, or manna from heaven. Really, it’s a sad commentary on the state of our sport that we find bikinis in the backcountry so shocking. Why, I ask you, is this not the norm?
I've heard good things about On the Loose- if you feel like meeting new people and getting off campus, take a look at their website.
ClubFiles is an ongoing series of on-campus student organization profiles.
Pitzer College's Green Bike Program is one of the few student organizations that has a permanent physical space, tucked in between the Grand Staircase and the Gold Student Center. As a staple of our community and sustainability efforts, GBP is here to stay. (Pomona College seems to be just catching up.) GBP's Elliot Dumont '10 was kind enough to answer my questions:
Hi Elliot! Introduce yourself:
My name is Elliot DuMont and I am from the amazing town of Tucson, Arizona located in the heart of the Sonoran Desert. I am a senior. My major is environmental studies with a minor in economics. My life is cycling- hobbies and interests follow. Among which are gardening, rainwater harvesting, cooking, and reading.
In one sentence, can you explain what the GBP stands for and what it does?
The GBP stands for the promotion of bicycle culture by creating a cooperative space where learning, sharing, and experiencing the bicycle takes place.
What services does the GBP provide?
Semester Raffle, Day Use Bikes, Mechanics Courses, Hair Cutting, Volunteer Hours, Work Study, Rides, Socials, Movies, Bike Polo, and General Shenanigans.
What do students involved in the club do during meetings/events? When and where do you meet?
Students participate in everything from helping to organize events to working on bikes.
We meet every Thursday at 7. Time is subject to change depending on severity of topics.
Did you found the club yourself or did you take it over from another student? What was the transition process like? I took it over from Marcus Berkowitz. The transition was hectic. We just moved into a new space and I just arrived back from a semester in Spain.
What is your biggest challenge in maintaining this club? How do you try to overcome it?
ORGANIZATION!!! Motivation and an openness to agree upon certain rules and regulations. This can be achieved through communal discussion and evaluation on what it means to be a part of the shop and the roles each of us play towards furthering the club.
What has been your greatest accomplishment or success since you’ve been in charge of the club?
Helping to achieve a budget from student senate, mechanics courses, wholesale retailer accounts, relationships with local bike shops.
What are your most important goals going into your senior year?
To do the best that I can in supporting the people who will be taking over the club next year.
Where does your funding come from? How much money were you allotted by Student Senate? If $100 were taken away from your budget, where would you cut your spending?
Our funding comes from student senate as we have become a Pitzer Club, we are allotted 3,000 dollars each year. If $100 were taken away we would probably cut event funding.
If you were given another $200, how would you spend that money?
The money would go to the purchase of new tools.
Is there anything else you want to say about GBP? We are not unifaceted but a very unique club in our ability to deal with bicycles on multiple levels and create an understanding of the social, institutional, and cultural aspects that are a part of the bicycle.
Finally, take a look at the GBP's top-secret in-house training video:[pro-player width='530' height='400' type='video' image='http://pitzeruncovered.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/GreenFreeze.png']http://pitzeruncovered.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Greenvideo.mp4[/pro-player]
If you want your student organization to be included in an upcoming ClubFile, contact me here.
There will be a senior class meeting this Wednesday at 7 PM in the grove house for any of you who are interested in getting involved. We will be discussing commencement speakers, our class prank, and the senior gift. I would love all the help I can get. Also, there will be grove house cookies so just stop by to hang out and say hi.
From Nicole Scheunemann at 12:13 pm on September 25 [my emphasis supplied]:
Hey lovely ladies and gents,
After a very emotionally charged meeting yesterday, Reggae Fest just wanted to say that we love all of you and hope there isn't any resentful feelings. We want everyone to know that we didn't call or ask that meeting to take place and are sorry if there is confusion over the fact. Nor did we want to pry money out of the hands of everyone else when we put in a funding request form to senate. We were trying to go about things our normal way, and while we appreciate the senate leaders trying a new approach, we wanted you to know that we didn't design the meeting or want to appropriate funds.We are also sorry about the lack of foresight on the part of the leaders of this festival last year to ask for funding last spring that seemed to cause this whole shenanagan. We don't want to start a listserv war, we just wanted to clear the air a little!
we are thankful and grateful to all the clubs!
peace, love and irie vibes,
Reggae Fest
When the current Senate funding levels were recently distributed, somebody pointed out the virtual ton of money literary magazine "The Otherside" received: $9000. I thought to myself, WOW. What could they possibly spend that much money on??
This evening I found the Otherside blog and I got my answer. From a blog entry written by Ana Iwataki '11 on November 5, 2008:
"Issue is coming tomorrow at four. It cost us $4000 including tax. Whoa. That's a lot."
These minutes are the first in an ongoing series of the selected best meeting minutes on campus. These minutes were recorded by Brian Bomhoff '10 for the first Senior Class meeting of the year. Edited and formatted for clarity.
In attendance: all who care, and have nothing better to do:
Megan, Amy, Luba, Sol, Jenna, Ben, Liz, Malcolm, Brian
Commenced 7:07pm
[Luba was hostess, serving raspberry iced tea to 4 people including herself]
Goals:
beat last year’s senior fundraising, shouldn’t be hard, we are the class of 2010
Jenna- get Tina Fey to come
Next Friday is Senior Class barbeque, Sept 25= barbeque with karaoke and a keg
some people in here are still underage… sucks for them
Groove at the Grove that week should be dedicated to the senior class
Jenna “do you remember the funk freshman year?”
Sol “mix it up, salsa, hip hop”
Jenna’s getting salsa tonight….
Feb 3rd, 100 days till graduation party (I’m not going, how depressing)
opportunity to talk to alum, speed dating, good because we haven’t hooked up with all the alum yet
What are alum we know doing?
Scotty Mc D works at a pool. Hot.
Ned Hallaby works at the farmer’s markets in Berkeley. ORGANIC!!!
Sean joined the meeting late at 7:16 pm
We then discussed current students who are involved in the entertainment industry
Volunteer opportunity
we could build a house, a LEED certified home
build a biodome for us to live in after graduation
Pitzer sucks at toy drives, we should do and do it good
danceathon
Jenna “I could grow a beard”
Luba –“I can grow a beard somewhere else”
at 7:21pm Malcolm’s computer started making my lap hot
[Tashi and Justin came it, but I think they’re here for something else, cookies?]
food not lawns- put food in your yard
terrorists are hungry
at 7:23pm fresh cookies were served
[owwwww why did I grab it, it’s soo hot . shit. Why do I always touch hot things]
If we get %100 participation, we should have a senior prom
be your own prom
tacky prom, classy prom?
yellow submarine – Jenna thinks this will make cool people come (druggies)
Malcolm “we operate under the assumption that everyone is as social as the people in this room, but that’s not true”
potential rewards/punishments for 100% participation for the Senior Class Gift
Jim Marchant, already has a tattoo, he should get a piercing somewhere…
Malcolm “nipple tassels for all the deans”
skinny dipping in the president’s pool
Amy -“Chris Freeburg should have to wear a tux everyday”
Laura Trombley hates blue, eradicating blue everywhere
CMC has a booze cruise, we don’t like that . We don’t like them
I could fly our class to Vegas on a jet , might take a few trips + $50,000 or two
we could combine prom with Scripps, Luba- “F*** that S***” Jenna- “we compete enough”
Possible merchandising opportunities
Jenna “instead of t-shirts we should do jumpsuits”
Luba, “we should do ONESIES!”
Megan - 2010 sunglasses, mmmmmm
Committee elections:
Commencement coordinators- Jenna and Luba
Communications and Public Relations- Brian + Sean
Events committee- Luba
Gift committee- undecided
-Hot CoCo stand on mounds
-Malcom -“beer coozies, flasks”
-Malcolm’s job, date coordinator- make sure all girls get invited to prom (pimp?)
-senior auction, who will buy students?
-Amy will be in charge of senior website, and all internety things
-Senior Class Barbeque this Friday, Sept 25th 7-9pm
we need barbequers, not me, I’ll give you salmonella (like the shakedown)
Below is a table with past and current Student Senate funding levels (at about 90% completeness and accuracy).
Click on the "2009-2010" column to see the best-funded organizations: PAct, Kohoutek, the Gold Student Center, and Dining with Democracy have a total of $76, 700, which is 38.65% of the entire Student Senate budget.
If you click on the "change" column you can see who the big winners are this year (I'm proud to say that Dining with Democracy was the recipient of the largest positive funding change this year-- and I wasn't even on campus to intimidate people this year!)
Comments on this would be awesome: what do you think gets too much money? Which org should get a ton MORE money?
Senate Student Organization Funding
[table id=5 /]
*edited to fix the Hall Council funding amounts - 3:54 pm
Also take note of the orgs that are now defunct (in Senate's eyes, at least):
The Pomona Student Union is putting on a cool event this Wednesday at 7 pm at the Rose Hills Theater:
The rise of the internet and last year’s global market free-fall were said to be harbingers of the “death of journalism,” yet both old and new media seem to be thriving at the 5Cs. Like a headache and a cup of coffee, TSL remains a Friday morning staple, and The Claremont Conservative has become a divisive campus sensation. Please join representatives from these and other campus publications to discuss the role and relevance of student media for discourse at the Claremont Colleges. While student journalists are encouraged to attend, this event will also present a chance for dedicated readers to have their voices heard.
PSU has done some awesome things in recent semesters. (To point to just two: Immediately after Obama was elected, Newsweek editor John Meacham gave an engaging talk on political strategy as well as a fascinating bit of armchair psychology about the President. And this past March, PSU staged a debate between Ken Starr and Erwin Chemerinsky, two men who are truly legal gods.)
So what is the state of on-campus student journalism? This is an incomplete list; if there are other publications I'm missing, please email me or let me know in the comments:
Pomona's The Student Lifehasn't had an online update in over one month.
Besides the Admission Office-run Admission Unpeeled blog, I believe that the blog you're reading right now is the only blog about Pitzer College.
Scripps College'sThe Voice seems like a solid resource but hasn't been updated online since May 1, 2009.
Harvey Mudd has a newspaper, the Muddraker (pdf download), but the latest online issue is three semesters old, filled with math humor and accounts of the zany stuff Mudders do in their free time.
Pitzer has seen attempts at on-campus journalism, but last year Pitzer's Orange Peel didn't survive the academic year. Why is Pitzer so lacking? For a few reasons:
Pitzer organizations have atrocious institutional memory. Most organizations don't have websites, don't have formal "passing the torch" mechanisms, handbooks for new members, or even basic documents like a mission statement, constitution, or resource inventory.
Good upcoming writers can easily work on The Student Life or the Forum, rather than be responsible for an entire publication launch.
Pitzer's online presence is largely based on student-talk email, the unmoderated email address that lets any registered Pitzer student address most of the college. Although this mechanism is awkward and unwieldy, it does provide an outlet for discussion that undermines the perceived need for a more stable forum.
This year I'll be hoping to see some enterprising student start something just for Pitzer- if you're thinking about it, go to this PSU event and to the Pitzer activities fair at 5 pm on Thursday, September 10 on the Mounds. And if you want to start a blog, I'd be happy to help you get going.
Because of the many excellent Orientation Adventure trips and the endearing aggression of Pitzer parents, well over half of the first-year class has already moved in, so move-in day should be less hectic and stressful than usual.
It will peak at over 100 degrees Fahrenheit so the earlier you can do your heavy lifting, the better. If you finish moving in, please look around for kids whose parents weren't able to come out with them and give them a hand: being part of the Pitzer community starts today!
If you don't know what to do, look around for somebody in the dark gray shirts- they're either Mentors, RAs, PAct members, or other helpful people that will help you out.
Remember to CHECK IN in the Gold Student Center so you are ready to meet your mentor on the mounds at 11 am. Even if you've already moved in, pick up your packet since it might have changes from the paperwork you've already seen.
Mentor posters will be posted on the outside pillars facing the Mounds in first-name alphabetical order (if your mentor's first name is Andrew, go towards McConnell; if your mentor's first name is Zarathustra, go in the direction of the Grove House).
This is the first in an ongoing series of on-campus student organization profiles.
While interning for Ernst & Young this summer in Moscow, senior Will Dozier took the time to answer my questions:
Introduce yourself, Will.
I am a senior from Washington, DC (the good Washington). I am an accounting major. I enjoy sports (Redskins), I am sort of a policy nerd when it comes to other hobbies. I like to debate, which is one reason I'm on Senate.
In one sentence, what does SIC stand for, and what does it do?
Student Investment Committee seeks to manage funds and educate members and other students about finance and all things business.
When and where do you meet?
We meet in GSC 108 once a week. We haven't set a day of the week or time yet but it's usually Tuesdays or Wednesdays at 8 or 8:30.
What do students involved in the club do during meetings/events?
During meetings, we like to joke around more than we should, really. But we have presentations about various stocks, we work on discounted cash flow valuations, and talk a lot about business with an emphasis on finance. Basically we're trying to make a presentation for SIC like a real presentation you might have to give in the business world.
We plan to do more engagement with those outside the club, especially on socially responsible investing (one of our controversial topics) next semester. We're really open to trying new things as well, so I really like it when people come and just ask questions.
I'd like to think that students get more real-life skills out of SIC than they do at most other clubs on campus. We try to be educational and we try to start to bridge the divide between economics in class and business. Not too many Pitzer students are in the business world, but we are in contact with a few (5 or so) for networking purposes. One of my personal goals is to make sure that everyone involved in the club now will maintain contact so we can grow our alumni network.
In my time at Pitzer I've been part of great clubs, and clubs that sucked, and then failed, and then disappeared. In my time on Student Senate, I've helped allocate money to groups that have flourished, and also to organizations that ended up meeting one time and yielding their money back at the end of the year. The question is:
How do you make a good student organization that is conducive to both getting shit done and having fun?
Here's the first in a series of posts discussing what makes a successful, fun, lasting student organization. This is my (initial) blueprint for how to start a club at Pitzer:
Get an idea.
What do you really care about? Would you actually like committing your time to it every week consistently, for the next semester or year? If you have a clear answer to both questions, keep going.
Make sure it doesn't already exist.
Check here for a list of Pitzer student organizations that was updated in Fall 2008, but most importantly check student-talk, the email distribution list that will lead 100s of emails to show up in your inbox. Type in relevant keywords in the search bar at the top left and see what comes up. If you find emails publicizing a club that seems really similar to the one you want to start, email the kid who sent them and try to join forces.
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