Davis engineers her own vision for the future

By Dave Utnik

Published: July 12, 2008

Words without actions are meaningless to DeCarol Davis so the necklace she’s wearing is significant only because the message transcends the symbolism it represents.
There is a personal meaning connected to the 10-word inscription that Davis once received as a Christmas gift, not because she considers Gandhi’s famous quotation a motto or a slogan but because it came from a United States Coast Guard Academy professor who recognized and encouraged the world vision of an idealistic 22-year-old.
Whenever she felt isolated as a young black woman at a military institution or ostracized as an exceptional student, Davis recalled not only Gandhi’s words, but also the constant validation from Dr. Faye Ringel, an English professor and director of the Coast Guard Academy honors program who encouraged Davis to excel as an electrical engineer.
“She’s the one who told me that it was OK to dream,” Davis said. “She told me it was OK to be smart and it was OK to change the world.”
It didn’t matter whether Davis accomplished that by playing clarinet in the regimental band, singing in the gospel choir, starting at guard for the women’s basketball team, writing a children’s play, serving as class president, volunteering with Habitat for Humanity or tutoring classmates in calculus and chemistry.
What mattered is that on her way to becoming the first black female in Coast Guard Academy history to graduate at the top of her class, Davis felt an obligation to contribute something significant to society and she refused to allow race or gender to stand in the way of her goals.
“The environment can be difficult,” she said. “There’s the cultural thing: Being black, being a female and having these social constructs made for you and wanting to combat those while still trying to be me.
“I think the academy does breed an environment that is ultra competitive and people don’t know who you are or want to get to know who you are. I was called names. I didn’t feel too good about that. I think what helped me get through that was finding how I wanted to be active in society and how I wanted to be a change agent.”
In her commencement address on May 21, the 2004 Forest Park High School graduate stood behind a podium on stage and offered her peers a glimpse of the person she has become and the changes she is attempting to make.
“Classmates, we are a family of volunteers (a family whether we like it or not) here to preserve and protect our nation and humanity. For the Coast Guard ‘any means necessary’ is not a willingness to kill for humankind but more so a willingness to die. This day marks our legacy. Let us make history.
“I know I’m up here today because I’m a nerd who managed to be the best number, the best piece of paper for the past four years, but I’d also like to think that I’m here because I respect humanity. I’m 22 years old so I’m not going to pretend to be some pseudo-righteous, overachiever who thinks she knows all the answers. But I am here to tell you that that I believe in a history and a now that is ours, a history and a now filled with consciousness of the human condition, filled with a respect for human beings.
“I need you to take this moment to see that I am black. See that I am a woman. I’m not going to tell you to close your eyes and imagine anything because we need to open our eyes and look at this reality dead in the face. I need you to see that I am human. I am just like you, no better, no worse. If we can accept each other’s humanity, we can make history.”
As the valedictorian for the Class of 2008 and a starter for the first Coast Guard Academy women’s basketball team to capture an East Coast Athletic Conference championship, Davis is proof that race and gender are irrelevant where history is concerned.
“She is a rare combination of tremendous academic intellect, athletic ability and personality,” said Bears women’s basketball coach Alex Simonka. “She came here with great potential, as do many, but is one of the few that realized her full potential when she left.
“What I like best about DeCarol is that even though she is head and shoulders above everyone intellectually, she never puts herself above anyone and you would never know she is number one in her class by talking with her.
“I do believe that she is destined for great things, if not in the Coast Guard, in the world. The Coast Guard may actually be too small for her potential.”
BOSS LADY
It isn’t potential, however, that sets Davis apart. It is her heart.
She is as personable and giving as she is intelligent and she has something in common with almost anyone she meets.
Her best pals — Brennan Richards, Erin Miller, Kristin Smith, Patrick Costello, Allison Mattox and Ecaterina Burton — are all fellow honor students from Forest Park High School, where she was also the valedictorian.
But Davis has a certain way of blending in even while she stands out.
“She can accomplish anything she sets out to do,” her father DeQuincey said. “DeCarol doesn’t see color. She wants people to realize that we are all the same and that we should respect each other. She is a people person and she knows how to interact with and relate to all walks of life.”
Her sister, Adriane Randolph, who is nine years older but prefers to say it’s “eight-and-a-half” said that DeCarol is “one of the most dynamic people I’ve ever known.”
That’s what made the alienation she sometimes felt at the Coast Guard Academy so difficult.
While drama club members volunteered their own time to help her build a set for a children’s play she wrote and produced, there were others who were threatened by Davis’ status as a Dean’s List student, Truman Scholar and class leader.
“There were incidents, a lot of them manifested toward me being the token black person and not having my leadership positions or my rank because of merit. And there were also misunderstandings about race, about gender,” Davis said. “It was a constant struggle at the academy. I’m glad it’s over.”
But Davis doesn’t regret the experience. She chose the Coast Guard Academy over Stanford and several Ivy League schools partly because Adriane studied engineering at the University of Virginia and partly because the academy’s curriculum ranks among the best in the country.
Basketball also played an important role in her decision. After playing a pivotal role in Forest Park’s rise from new school to Group AAA state champions, Davis, though DeQuincey received a hint about his daughter’s future when she was still a toddler.
“I’m a car enthusiast and I used to take her to the junk yard with me,” he said. “I knew she’d be an engineer because when she was 2 or 3 she figured out how to lock me in the car.”
According to family legend, it was around the same age that DeCarol also worked as a model and began helping her sister with math homework.
Both stories are exaggerations of the original truth but they are examples of how Adriane influenced her sister’s career path.
“Adriane was the best role model in the world. She’s my sister. I’m biased. What are you going to do?” DeCarol said. “She raised me too but we’re both each other’s biggest fans. There was never any competition between us. It was always completely supportive. My family really helped to form my identity.”
DeCarol’s 15 minutes of fame as a model, for instance, materialized one morning when Adriane, who was a high school valedictorian at Thomas Jefferson, realized she had a school project due and recruited her baby sister to pose for a photo essay entitled: “What to do on a rainy day.”
“She loved it,” Adriane said. “She was really hamming it up for the camera. I’m really thankful that I did a good job as a big sister because that’s a pretty important job for me.”
As for DeCarol’s early beginnings as a tutor, “the stories of me helping her with her homework are really just me scribbling in her calculus book,” Davis said. “She’d let me hang out in her room and that was nice.”
And that is where DeCarol learned the importance of hard work.
Education has always been a top priority in the Davis home. Adriane has a PhD from Georgia State and is now an assistant professor of business information systems management at Kennesaw State University, while DeQuincey has a master’s degree in finance and her mother, Carolyn, has a master’s degree in library science.
“The best thing about our family is that we aren’t accolade counters,” Davis said. “No one cares. It’s the most supreme humble factor going home — ‘We don’t know what that scholarship is, go wash the dishes.’
“That’s how it works, you work hard and you represent the family well and you respect people. But at the same time, you go home and you’re just like everybody else.”
Only Davis clearly has her own way of doing things.
She wrote an original poem that was read at Adriane’s wedding, created the Coast Guard Academy’s first recycling program and earned the nickname “Boss Lady” during frequent trips to visit her grandparents, Perry and Fannie Simon, at their shoe shop in Darlington, S.C.
“I used to go down to grandma and grandpa’s shoe shop and sit at the cash register and help out, meaning do absolutely nothing but pretend that I was helping out,” Davis said. “They called me Boss Lady because I thought I was the boss. From then to now, I’ve always been ‘Boss Lady.’”
THE LITTLE ENGINEER
Now it’s Ensign Davis who is in charge.
Only, technically, she is on administrative absence from her tour as a marine inspector on Staten Island in order to serve an internship for DC Voice, a community action research organization that is dedicated to improving education in the District of Columbia.
It’s a summer project that Davis is excited about because it has something in common with the play she developed during her sophomore year.
Following the advice that Adriane once gave her to “share your God-given gifts,” DeCarol began her crusade to make engineering kid friendly with the creation of “The Little Engineer” — a project that has been copyrighted.
“Really all of us are engineers, it’s just problem solving,” she explained. “There are cookies on top of the refrigerator. How am I going to get to the cookies? I’m going to get a chair, climb onto the counter and grab the cookies. That’s engineering.”
And Davis wanted kids to relate. So after meeting a young boy who didn’t know what an engineer was and figured he couldn’t be one, she teamed up with Capt. Anne Flammang to create a superhero drama.
“I just wanted something fun,” she said. “I wanted it to be colorful, exciting and just fun.
“I wrote the play the end of my sophomore year and the summer I spent getting supplies and getting a crew and cast and building the set during the night. It was the most wonderful thing to see it actually happen. I’m so thankful to the drama club because it would not have happened if they didn’t volunteer their time.”
The “Little Engineer” was Davis’ most significant contribution to the Coast Guard Academy because, like her, it enables children to dream.
And, during the darkest of times, it gave her hope and a reason to succeed.
“I don’t feel like a pioneer,” she said. “What matters to me is that I graduated because there were times when I definitely wanted to quit. No doubt. There were times when I hated being there and I really struggled with it.
“But I wanted a degree and, in a very superficial sense, it was a tuition-free education and that was a factor. I wouldn’t say it was about proving something to society as much as it was about proving something to myself. I’m proud to say I graduated from the Coast Guard Academy because inside I know what I had to go through to earn that degree.”