Summer — 2008

Pantea Shademani

Psychology/Science

“My Astronomy teacher, Simon Balm? His ‘Big Question’ is: Is there life elsewhere in the universe? I don’t know, but there is certainly a lot of life in his classes.”

She is indeed a rarity, Pantea Shademani. There just aren’t a lot of people on earth fluent in Farsi, American English, and Swedish. But she explains her linguistic gift quite simply. “I was born in Iran, but we moved to Sweden when I was one year old. And my mom raised my bilingually with English, as well,” says Pantea. “But I was a little bored with Sweden,” a country with a population smaller than that of Greater LA. “So I decided to come to SMC for something a little different. I liked it, and I decided to stay.”

Now in her sixth semester, Pantea is looking forward to her June graduation. “I’m applying to Cal State Northridge because they have an excellent Psychology department there. Then I’ll be going to graduate school at UCLA. But I’ve also been studying science here at SMC, and I don’t understand why everybody thinks it’s so hard. Physics is fun!” she says with a delighted laugh. And Pantea reports that her ambition to be a psychologist was the result of yet another ‘hard right turn’ in her improbable life.

“I was actually a Computer Science major when I took a psych class at SMC, and I discovered that I really liked it. So I kept taking classes, and then decided that was the degree I wanted to graduate with.” She adds, “I was still in Sweden when I chose SMC, because it had the best reputation of all community colleges, and it’s cheap, as well! And of course, the location is the best!”

Pantea offers the following advice to other international students choosing SMC’s ‘location.’ “Make sure you talk with counselors when you first get here, because it can be really overwhelming. And then make really good relationships with your teachers. If you do these two things, it’ll make everything ten times easier.”

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