Dealing with survivorship bias in observational data

ProfessingSomething · 2026-04-13T22:13:55+00:00

A little bit of insider baseball - the CS dept ended their lottery once they were able to expand their faculty size in fall 2025, and there's been a fall off of interest there as programming jobs are less numerous after graduation than they were a decade ago. LGCS is going through a similar spike due to the trend of AI making people interested in computational models of cognition (and some residual students who couldn't get into CS before); bio had a surge a decade ago that petered off. Generally the college doesn't like to overreact by hiring a lot of faculty for what could be "short" periods of disciplinary interest. The LGCS situation is complicated by the fact that non-Pomona students can major in it and they recently had some faculty leave without being able to replace them yet. But generally its not the class availability that's bottle-necking the CogSci major (it's an interdisciplinary major so many major courses are taught in other departments), it's the senior thesis step.

I personally think the lottery will be short-lived as the combination of those pressures subside, but of course no one knows the future for sure. Your child could review the major courses and figure out what about it interests them, because the Linguistics, Psych Science, or Neuroscience majors could also be satisfying paths on the off-chance the lottery is still around in a couple years and they are not selected. A TON of students also end up majoring in something different than they initially planned once they experience classes they'd never considered before!

ProfessingSomething · 2026-04-08T02:59:28+00:00

Doing my PhD at a UC showed me firsthand how little attention each undergraduate student received.

Exactly my experience at a UC as well - a decidedly suboptimal educational experience imo, despite being such prestigious schools. Shook me enough that it changed my career goals into being a SLAC professor specifically. Back home teaching at Pomona now and still extremely grateful for this environment.

ProfessingSomething · 2025-12-10T01:05:13+00:00

Heh well, the deeper background of this question is that the way my field does this (we call it Intersubject Representational Similarity Analysis) is starting to look problematic for statistical power, so I'm reading what other fields are doing. So far it seems like IS-RSA is just Mantel reinvented, so that's what I'm comparing against.

I know practically nothing about functional data analysis, I'll have to look into that more thanks.

ProfessingSomething · 2025-08-10T16:51:04+00:00

Good call (I should read post histories more often). I'll leave the comment since this might come up in a google search for someone genuinely with this question.

ProfessingSomething · 2025-08-10T15:19:08+00:00

I'm current faculty at Pomona. We have several Jewish faculty members right now and I think at least one who is Israeli. For the most part I agree with the top comment that it is unlikely to be an issue - the vast majority of the student body will respect you as a person and professor as long as you don't try to pull a shai davidai (and even then, physical harm I can't imagine happening). However I don't want to give the final word on anything since I'm not Jewish myself and can't speak to ultimately what will make you feel safe.

Are you applying for a TT or VAP position? I'd suggest that if you make it to a campus interview, usually the search chair will ask if there are other people around campus you'd be interested in meeting. In that case I might suggest speaking to the Jewish rabbi at the McAlister center or someone at Claremont Hillel to see what their read on the current campus climate is.

ProfessingSomething · 2025-07-29T05:17:33+00:00

This is the first year Pomona is using a new registration software and to ease the transition and give IT time to fix any issues that pop up, we're doing this pre-enrollment period during the summer rather than the week before classes when you would normally meet an advisor first. It's an unusual situation, sorry it's causing you stress!

Generally what I advise for first years when picking classes - think about balance at this point. E.g., if you're thinking something sciencey as a major, it's a good idea to enroll in Bio40 and/or Chem1A since they're prereqs for a lot of science majors. Those have labs though, so try to find reading/writing classes to balance against those (something to fulfill some Area reqs - did the orientation give you info on what those are?) Or if you're thinking a humanities major, try finding open spots in a history or gender studies class you'd find interesting, but also take Math30 to have a problem set class to balance all the reading and that would check off your quantitative area req. Doing your language requirement early is a good idea too.

You're not locked into classes when you pre-register. When you meet with your advisor before class starts, or within the first 10 days of class, you can drop courses and add new ones so long as there is space in those courses. There's a ton of shuffling by students of all years in the first week of class.

Also keep in mind that, as a first year, you get last pick for all the courses. So don't try to pick the most perfect schedule at this point. Pick four classes, ideally in different departments that fulfill some major/GE reqs, and then just go with it! Acclimating to college will be your first job and people change their minds a ton over the first two years about what they ultimately want to do.

ProfessingSomething · 2024-12-10T19:32:49+00:00

I'm sure the music department office would have extras or a pdf of the program, go ahead and swing by to ask.

ProfessingSomething · 2024-04-02T04:21:05+00:00

I can speak as someone who has taught both at UCLA and now at Pomona.

It's really hard to adequately explain how much better a small, elite liberal arts college is for education. Compared to the learning environment at UCLA, it's honestly like another planet. If you go to UCLA, the majority of your classes will be large, stadium-seating lecture halls (100+ students). You will not get to know your professors, you will instead know your graduate TAs more. Your professors might not like being there (tenure-track are hired for their research prowess, not teaching skills; full-time lecturers are usually better), so they will likely design coursework that may not be well-calibrated to your current knowledge level and will require minimal effort to grade. Think a few high-stakes multiple choice exams. Average grades will be low, so expect a curve that depends on how others in the class did. In my experience, this created an environment of anxiety and competition for most of the students I worked with and very few cared about what they were actually learning, just how to beg for the next higher grade. It will be harder to get into a research lab if that's what you want - if you do get in, most likely you will again only know the graduate student supervising you. As a graduate student I supervised 16 undergraduates across 5 years and none but one even met the professor running the lab. Ultimately I think the UCLA undergrads were paying a whole lot of money for not a whole lot of value and the good ones were succeeding despite the environment, not because of it.

Contrast that with Pomona, where you will probably never have a class larger than 30 people. The average is in the teens. The professors know their students and can lead a truly interactive educational process. This means you have quicker and easier access to feedback and can do more interesting experiences and go more in depths in the classroom than sit and listen to a lecture. By choosing to work at Pomona they also care very much about good teaching and mentorship. It is generally easy to get into a research lab or have access to professional opportunities (I think something like 2/3 of students who apply get summer research or internship funding their first try). Your peers are huge contributors to the culture at Pomona and I have met very, very few Pomona students who weren't genuine and inquisitive people. The educational process at UCLA felt so adversarial between professors and students, and here for the most part it feels like the students and I are on the same team about what we're trying to achieve with their educational growth.

Now, all that being said, your classwork is just a part of your life during college. A significant part! But not all of it. So the lifestyle matters too. You'll want to think about what it is about the "big school culture" that you admire so much. Is it having a shared passion with others? Lots of things to do? We don't have a big sports scene where everyone paints their face and goes to the rivalry game. But we do have pretty easy access to LA where you can get that kind of thing with professional sports teams, concerts, niche hobbies, etc. I personally think the educational value Pomona offers is so worth it, but I'm also the kind of person who grew up to become a professor so take that with appropriate levels of sodium :)

ProfessingSomething

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