#SoCaltech: Randolph Douge
“Warner Robins, Georgia, has somewhere around 80,000 people in it, but I live in a smaller section of it—the Lake Joy area. It’s a tight-knit, close community. If I go somewhere and ask someone for help, they treat me like I'm their son or their cousin.
“For a decent amount of my life, I was the kid that wanted to build stuff because creation intrigued me: You put effort into it, and you produce an amalgamation of your thoughts in physical form. But more recently, since Warner Robins is a military town, I’d see a lot of military veterans, amputees, and physically disabled people working out, walking to the store, and just doing their daily activities—and they just go about it so casually. When I saw that, I was like, ‘Wait a minute, this is an engineering problem. I think I want to go into a field like prosthetics where I can research more about how mechanical arms and legs work and help said people to do normal things like hold a cup, walk up and down some stairs, or just hang out with their loved ones.’
“The majority of my family is from the Midwest, so a lot of them, including me, did not know Caltech existed up until I got a chance to participate in the Caltech Up Close fly-in program. I didn’t know much about it but figured I get to go to California to a really good school, and I get the chance of getting in. Why not try? When I got there, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is the place I want to be at. I love it here.’ It has the same small-town community feel—and on top of that, I now have that STEM support and that support group of other like-minded kids.
“It was a real culture shock being around other kids who loved STEM as much as I did because, in Warner Robins, I felt like an outlier in the sense that I would talk about these big dreams and people would be like, ‘Uh, OK.’ But here, if I say I want to work at NASA, people are like, ‘Oh, yeah! That’s possible!’ It’s such a crazy thing for me, and it makes me want to work harder because I’m around other people who also want to make their dreams happen. It’s really inspiring to me.”
Randolph Douge, who joins Caltech as a first-year undergraduate student this fall, is one of many students to attend due, in part, to outreach efforts by the Caltech Up Close and similar programs such as STARS (Small Town and Rural Student) College Network. Caltech was one of the 16 inaugural members of STARS when it launched in 2023. STARS recently doubled its membership to include 32 of the most prominent institutions in the nation, all dedicated to helping students from small-town and rural America attend and graduate from the undergraduate program of their choice.
#SoCaltech is an occasional series celebrating the diverse individuals who give Caltech its spirit of excellence, ambition, and ingenuity. Know someone we should profile? Send nominations to magazine@caltech.edu.