Meet a Pitzer Student: Graham Brady ’21

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Video Transcript

I think at Pitzer is not just that they say, “Oh, I agree with that,” they’re really doing something about it and no matter how big or small their difference is, it’s still a difference.

My name is Graham Brady I am a first-year here at Pitzer, and I’m intending on studying environmental analysis.

I came to Pitzer because, when I was looking at schools to apply to, I wanted something that had more of a mission. The core values of Pitzer—namely, environmental sustainability and student engagement—were the two that really drew me to want to come here.

All of the students here have something that makes them unique, and I think that that’s also true with jazz musicians, whether they are students or are professionals.

So I’m a member of the Jazz Ensemble, which is at Pomona. Although it has Pomona students in it, there are students from four of the five colleges—that’s been a really good tool for meeting other students in the consortium.

If you just listen to someone play, you can tell what kind of jazz artists they’ve been listening to or what they like. Everything that someone does really affects how they play, and you can probably tell how their day has been when they play a solo. Or like it would only happen that way in that moment just based on how they’re feeling or what they’re thinking about, and you can never really go back to that. And I think that’s so cool because although you can transcribe what someone plays it’s always gonna be like, that’s what they played and they own that.

Each student here at Pitzer has their own unique qualities that makes them uniquely Pitzer; there’s not one definition that you can use to define a Pitzer student. I think that that’s also similar in terms of jazz, where each player has their own unique reasons for wanting to play it a certain way and you can’t really use a set of words to define how they’re playing or why it is that they’re playing what they’re playing. I’ve certainly found that what I just described is true especially here at Pitzer.

My name is Graham Brady, and I’m a Pitzer student.

About Pitzer College

Pitzer College is a nationally top-ranked undergraduate liberal arts and sciences institution. A member of The Claremont Colleges, Pitzer offers a distinctive approach to a liberal arts education by linking intellectual inquiry with interdisciplinary studies, cultural immersion, social responsibility, and community involvement. For more information, please visit www.pitzer.edu.