Hey everyone! My name is Emma, and I’m one of the awesome admission fellows here at Pitzer. As a second semester senior I’m currently in the process of writing an honors thesis for my major, Organizational Studies (which is basically a liberal arts, interdisciplinary way of doing a business major), on the effectiveness of Appreciative Inquiry as a method of evaluation. For the past couple of months I’ve been doing lots of library research with the aid of our very helpful Honnold-Mudd librarians, brainstorming ideas with my advisors, sending emails to leaders in the field, and I even attended the Positive Psychology Symposium at Claremont Graduate University, which had the founders and leaders of the field speaking. Unfortunately, the easy part is now over and I must start writing. Yuck.
Aside from being an Organizational Studies major I also have a minor in Economics. As one of the professors will be retiring at the end of the year, the school recently went through a job search to fill his position and had the final three candidates to campus in the past three weeks. Everyone on campus was invited to attend the job talks and attendance ranged from the Dean of Faculty to members of the Economics field group to students to members of the maintenance staff, and everyone’s evaluation of the candidates was taken into consideration. I was invited by the field group to take a larger role in the selection process by eating lunch with the candidates after their talks in order for us to better get to know them and for them to get to know what Pitzer students are really like. Although the verdict is still out on who will be joining the Economics field group this fall, having met all three candidates I can say with complete confidence that no matter who is chosen they will make an excellent addition to the campus!
I hope that this was a good peek into what the life of a senior is like here at Pitzer and into our selection process for new faculty. If you have any question about the Economics or Organizational Studies field groups (or about anything related to Pitzer) please feel free to shoot me an email and give me a good distraction from writing my thesis!
Posted by Emma Perlmutter
