Donny Lu ’26 visited the Office of the Registrar four times during his three years at Pomona to declare different majors, his wavering not uncommon among a student body that’s encouraged to explore its many interests.
Lu ultimately decided to major in physics, which he finished in a year before heading to Caltech for a 3/2 program in engineering.
“Exploration is fundamentally the core of education,” he says. “Pomona gave me the opportunity to try what I wanted.”
Lu graduated in May with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Pomona and a Bachelor of Science degree from Caltech. Now he’s in San Francisco launching a startup to build a hardware ecosystem in the U.S.
A Lifelong Tinkerer
Lu’s interest in technology began as a child in Shenzhen, China—“the Silicon Valley of China,” as Lu says it’s nicknamed—where he would visit the local tech market every weekend. At age 10, he was asking vendors for electronic parts to build desktop fans and other gadgets.
“I would go to them and say, ‘I want this chip and this chip,’” says Lu. “They had all the components to build things.”
At Pomona, Lu continued tinkering, now in Estella Laboratory.
In a makerspace in the basement, he and a friend built projects from scratch. The two once needed a specific part to complete a tank wheelchair for his friend’s mom to use on hikes. Every U.S. company quoted them $40,000 for it.
They ultimately got the piece for $300 from a company in China.
Seeing the difference in costs motivated Lu to find a way to build hardware economically in the U.S.
From Philosophy to Economics to Politics
The path to his purpose was a circuitous one. When applying to colleges, Lu wanted a place that offered “holistic exploration” rather than a strict path to a career. Pomona afforded him ample space to delve into his interests—so much so that he jokes the registrar’s office staff got tired of seeing him.
Lu first looked into philosophy, having studied existential philosophy in high school. Realizing quickly it wasn’t what he wanted to focus on, he switched to economics. Not long after, he began craving classes that incorporate rigorous debate.
So he pivoted to politics.
Lu thrived in that department as he relished classroom activities such as mock policy debates, in which student-proposed policies were argued and voted on by classmates.
“We got not just hands-on experience but also the ability to really understand things on a deeper level from talking to people,” he says.
Lu spent his sophomore spring semester is Washington, D.C. as part of Claremont McKenna College’s Washington Program, which combines academic coursework with a full-time internship.
Lu interned for U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries during his first term as the House Minority Leader.
“Imagine you’re a college sophomore but you’re seeing some of the most powerful people in the world every day,” says Lu. “The experience exposed me to what politics is like. It helped me understand that there are a lot of negotiations that go on before policies are passed.”
Physics in One Year
But it was also in D.C. that Lu came to a greater realization: the issues he cared about most—pushing for new technologies and bringing manufacturing back to the U.S.—don’t start with politics.
They end there.
The summer before his junior year, Lu decided to major in physics and pursue a 3/2 program to learn more about building hardware domestically.
That meant he had to complete the entire major in one year. Over the summer, he studied for and tested out of two introductory physics and one chemistry class required for the major. His junior year, he took seven classes each semester.
Lu admits his path was unconventional and pushed him to his limits.
“Just go for it,” he says was his thinking.
Classes such as Physical Chemistry taught Lu how to think rigorously and prepared him for his career.
“That class almost made me give up, but Fred Grieman was a really good professor,” he says. “Even after it was dark outside, he stayed to help me understand all the problems. He really cared about how you understand a concept intuitively.”
Living the Startup Life
Lu’s new startup, Dlab Sciences, is trying to solve the problem of building hardware economically by automating the tool- and die-making process for U.S. manufacturing companies.
In San Francisco, he is part of a network of startup founders from The Claremont Colleges. Two Claremont McKenna College alumni “are connecting everyone in The Claremont Colleges ecosystem,” says Lu.
While “it’s still super early,” he says, Lu wouldn’t have even gotten to this point without the freedom to probe his interests at Pomona.
“I got the chance to explore what I want to do,” he says. “That’s the point of Pomona College.”