Meet MSU’s very own Doug Amick

Monday midmornings in Rendezvous Dining Pavilion are always teeming with activity. However, one figure holds dominion over the steady flow of students entering and departing.

Culinary Associate Doug Amick raises his hand in farewell to a large group of students heading to class. Only a beat later, he’s greeting someone else with a smile and a joke as he swipes their CatCard.

Day in and day out, Amick greets the hungry hordes of MSU with a smile and a friendly salutation. His favorite part of the job? “It's got to be the students. I can come in here and I can be tired and glum for some reason or another. [Then] that stream of students comes through with their big smiles and their goodwill and their humanity and I just start warming up from the inside out. It's a wonder to behold,” he said.

Amick grew up in Oklahoma and attended the University of Oklahoma after high school, though it took him another couple of decades before he went back to school and earned an undergraduate degree. He moved to Montana in 1986 and has been a Bozemanite since 1996. The 73-year-old is currently starting his third year working in Culinary Services, he said.

Besides being a commercial truck driver, a cashier at Town and Country and a Streamline bus driver throughout his life, he was also a member of a more unique community during his young adulthood. “I have to laugh at myself because I really have taken an orthodox route in life. I was a part of a wacky New Age religious cult for a couple of decades,” he said. 

“It was classic, you know? The early 70’s. Don't know what to do with your life? Well, let's see. Join the army. Join a hippie commune or hey, how about a cult?” he said. 

This chapter of his life also included being a shepherd for three years and a member of a polka band for a decade in Los Angeles. 

During his job now at the dining hall, Amick said he has come to value the quest for exploration of the material universe rather than the spiritual. “I think that's where that's where the real payload is,” he said. “There's this young lady who's toting around this massive cell biology text and I think, wow. And she's clearly into it. What an extraordinary experience that must be to learn about such a basic element of life.”

Amick tries hard to make the best of every day by trying to get to know the students’ names who come into the dining hall — but why? “I figured the job can be pretty tedious. It's just a lot of swiping cards. So I figured right from the start, I gotta go make this more interesting, to see how many names I can learn. I'm pretty good at it. I've always kind of had that inclination, because I found that if you know someone's name, the interaction is going to be a lot more personal.”

“It's really kind of interesting, because some people, from my perspective, just demand to be known. There's just something about their personhood. I gotta know who this is, you know,” he said.

James Jordan, a freshman studying chemistry, met Amick during the first week of school this semester and connected with him over the topic of music. “I thought that he was a super nice guy,” he said. “It’s just nice to know someone when you walk into the dining hall and have a conversation.”

Helen Vandenbark, a liberal studies freshman, said she met Amick on one of her first days eating in the dining hall. “I thought that he had a really good attitude even though he’s just sitting, swiping people’s cards all day,” she said. “He reminds me to be positive on ordinary days. I could never imagine him making a negative impact on someone’s day.”

“I love to see Doug,” sophomore kinesiology student Jenna Horst said. “At first, it was just because he cracked me up, but now, this year, he has made an effort to learn my name which makes me smile every time,” she said. “As somebody who is living on campus for their second year and is required to have a dining hall plan, it makes the experience of coming to get a meal much more enjoyable.” 

“He’s a very upstanding fellow,” freshman pre-med student Sydney Hathaway said when asked what she thought about Doug. “I love him. I feel like he makes everyone feel seen.”

Undoubtedly, Amick is one of the many figures on campus who actively make students’ lives better. When asked if he was aware of the impact he’s had, he just laughed and shook his head. “I guess part of the surprise is how powerfully this seems to resonate with students, because I don't think that was really the [objective.] I think the [objective] initially was kind of a little selfish — this job is going to be more engaging if I know who it is that I'm serving. But I found that there's nothing that resonates with a human being more powerfully than their name. I can see it in their faces. You know, hi Susan! And they light up,” he said.

“It's made me fall in love with the human race all over again. Because these students, they've got oodles of goodwill and humanity.”