Luis Gonzalez-Gonzalez shoots for the stars
Luis Gonzalez-Gonzalez ’27 remembers applause filling the Greenville Convention Center, bumping fists with friends and tears welling in his mother’s eyes as he rose from his seat to accept one of Clemson University’s first Boeing STEM Tiger Alliance Scholarships. Cameras flashed as he walked up to the podium and shook hands with President Jim Clements.
“It definitely has a big impact,” Gonzalez-Gonzalez said just over a year later. “Whenever I go back to high school and talk to juniors and seniors, I tell them that when someone wants you, they will show it. Clemson showed it versus all those other universities.”
The ceremony was just the beginning for Gonzalez-Gonzalez, a first-generation college student who is now a sophomore majoring in mechanical engineering. He jumped directly into Tiger life as a freshman, joining the Clemson Rocket Engineering Club, where he is on the flight dynamics team. He has also made friends and begun networking through PEER & WISE, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers and Latinos Unidos.
Romina Dotson ’27, a friend since they were both students at Berea Middle School, said Gonzalez-Gonzalez is fun, refuses to brag about his accomplishments and fully deserves recognition as a champion.
“He has been through so much in his life, and, at the end of the day, he still manages to come through it all no problem,” said Dotson, a sophomore majoring in microbiology.
The road to Clemson had more than its fair share of bumps for Gonzalez-Gonzalez, an only child who lived with his mother. As a Berea High School freshman, he attended class online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He said that life outside school also brought challenges, including his family’s house needing a renovation after it was flooded.
Gonzalez-Gonzalez said he worked nearly full time through much of high school, first at an ice cream shop and then at a convenience store, to augment income from his mother’s housekeeping job. He kept up the hard work in the summer before sophomore year at Clemson, this time by guiding high school students who were on campus for two programs, Tiger Alliance and the Snelsire, Sawyer, & Robinson Clemson Career Workshop.
The opportunity gave Gonzalez-Gonzalez, who participated in Tiger Alliance while in high school, a chance to pass on his experience just as others had passed theirs to him a few years earlier. Looking ahead, Gonzalez-Gonzalez already has some ideas for what he wants to do after college, and it involves literally shooting for the stars.
“I want to work with rockets, shuttles — I just want to work on something that goes into space,” he said.
Gonzalez-Gonzalez already has a launching pad, and it’s called Clemson.
