Apr 18, 2023
By the time Alex Castrejon graduated from high school, he had visited Georgia Tech’s campus nine times. Since sixth grade, he knew that he wanted to be an engineer, and Georgia Tech was his dream school.
Growing up in metro Atlanta, he worked on construction sites and cleaned dishes part-time. His parents, both immigrants from Southern Mexico, pushed him to go to college so he wouldn’t have to keep working manual labor jobs. But the path to actually enrolling at Tech was anything but easy.
Castrejon’s high school was a low-income school that received federal funding to support underprivileged students, and he spent a lot of time worrying that he wasn’t “good enough” for Tech. Those worries ended up being unfounded. Yet Castrejon found himself facing another obstacle: health challenges in his family strained finances and left him wondering whether he could afford the Georgia Tech education he had dreamed about.
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Alex Castrejon headshot
“College was still in my future, but it looked like it would take a different shape than I’d imagined,” Castrejon said. “I prepared myself to be a commuter student, and to keep my job in construction, balancing that with classes. It felt unfair – I was finally good enough, but I didn’t have the means to fully immerse myself in school.”
Then, Castrejon received a letter that he had been accepted to the College of Engineering’s Clark Scholars Program.