October 10 2022: Ciara Chow ' 18

“Athenian is a pretty easy place to fall into an interest in politics,” said Ciara. The broad selection of seminar style history and literature classes and the school’s Social Justice lens made it easy for her to connect to a subject matter that came naturally to her. Math was a different story. “I wasn’t ever horrible at math, but it was definitely hard for me – I had to work really hard at it to do well and I didn’t always like that.” Things began to shift for Ciara during her junior and senior year at Athenian. Taking calculus classes with teachers Rostislav and Howard changed Ciara’s trajectory. “They really created the environment for me to imagine studying math in college. It was collaborative, we worked together in student groups on problem sets. We were learning from each other rather than competing against each other. I really enjoyed doing a subject that was hard for me and seeing how my peers' brains worked and how they approached the same problem.” The combination of math and politics at Pomona allowed Ciara to pursue both interests in an environment that had a lot in common with Athenian.

“At Athenian, you are expected to speak up in class, to state an opinion and back it up. This is something that serves me now in the workforce and is a skill I didn’t truly appreciate until I got to Pomona and realized that not all my classmates were comfortable speaking up.” Athenian was a safe place for Ciara to practice this skill, to make mistakes, and to try again. “Much of my job now is having an opinion or idea and being able to back it up with reason and data. Your idea might be right, or someone might prove it wrong, but both lead to growth and learning.”

“The work I do at Lyft is meaningful and definitely fulfills my desire to work on big, complex problems.” Ciara’s team is tasked with getting Lyft’s entire platform electric in the next eight years. “It is a highly collaborative environment, like I had at Athenian. As a product manager, I work on things from conception to launch so I do a lot of ideation and design-thinking in partnership with cross-functional teams.” Ciara works most closely with software engineers, product designers, data scientists, and user experience researchers. “I like the diversity of the work and people, and the collaborative and at times messy environment.” 

Even though Athenian was a safe place to make mistakes, Ciara would tell her 17 or 18 year self to take more risks. “I put a lot of pressure on myself to perform in my academic classes,” said Ciara. While she acknowledges this drive helped get her where she is today, she thinks she could have sacrificed a little of that effort to take a few more risks, to try new and different things.

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