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[quote=Anonymous]Another Pomona alum
Went to Baldy all the time so I don’t know wtf the other poster is talking about. When it snowed big groups of us would hop in cars and be at the snow line in 20 mins. I didn’t have a car but enough students did that getting around the area wasn’t an issue. Never went to the beach during term but certainly did during the summer I stayed on campus. 
Smog was a problem for a few weeks in the fall but most of the year it was clear and you could see the mountains. I’m not sure how long ago the previous poster went to Pomona but my impression is that LA smog was far worse in the 80s/90s so it’s possible the smog situation has significantly changed 
Close enough to Joshua Tree and the Eastern Sierras that you could easily do a serious backpacking trip on a regular weekend. The school had a wonderful outdoors club and you could check out equipment easily. For longer breaks (fall break, spring break) there were trips to places like Grand Canyon, Zion, Yosemite, that the school would fund.
Overall excellent faculty who had very close relationships with students. It was very common to go to dinner at their houses, babysit their kids, etc. One of my friends was David Foster Wallace’s regular house sitter/dog walker.
Good research opportunities when you don’t have grad students and post docs to compete with. It was very common for students to graduate in the sciences with a first author publication. Science grads typically went to top tier med and grad schools. I did summer research projects at Pomona and at major research institutions and as an undergrad the experience at Pomona was far better.
I didn’t go in to LA all that often but was certainly an option. The school would offer cheap tickets and transport for things like LA Philharmonic and opera and I did that a few times. I went out in Hollywood a few times and had a blast. But definitely not an every weekend thing (I wouldn’t have been able to afford it more often).
Much easier to get to and from campus than Amherst and Williams. I’m from the West Coast and getting to those would have been a nightmare. I did visit Amherst in high school and was so turned off by the remote location that I decided not to visit Williams, Middlebury, etc. Pomona’s culture is fairly integrated with the rest of the 5 C’s so it’s a much bigger student community than the east coast SLACs.
Lots of kids who come to Pomona from other parts of the country end up staying West (probably Bay Area more than LA). So if your kid from DC goes there beware that they may never come back…

I am worried that the campus atmosphere has worsened since I graduated. I went back for an alumni weekend and was taken aback by the viciousness of student protests against the outgoing president over the firing of undocumented dining hall workers several years earlier. I felt that there was a culture of mutual respect when I attended that had been lost. Not sure if that’s the same at all left-leaning colleges.

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