Georgia Tech was always a dream for Papa Quainoo. The only problem? It was over 5,000 miles away. Quainoo, a third-year student in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, is a native of Ghana, where he lived until his high school graduation.

Quainoo’s father worked in ticketing at a travel tour agency in Ghana, which was Quainoo’s first exposure to aerospace engineering. He had always assumed airplanes were as small as they seemed from the ground, but his first up-close encounter with an airplane sparked a new curiosity in aviation.

“Birds are small and can fly,” he said, but seeing the sheer size of an airplane made him wonder: “How do planes fly, and how do they stay in the air?”

Quainoo knew coming to Georgia Tech as an international student was difficult, but he said he adopted a mindset of, “I’m going to get a degree,” and would figure out how along the way. When his father relocated to Georgia, Quainoo decided the best option was to attend Georgia State University’s Perimeter College for two years and then transfer to Georgia Tech.

This fall, Quainoo made that part of his dream a reality, enrolling in his first aerospace engineering courses at Tech. And his faith that he would figure out how to get his Georgia Tech degree was rewarded: The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation selected Quainoo for one of just 100 Undergraduate Transfer Scholarships in 2022. The prestigious award pays up to $55,000 a year for community college students to complete their bachelor’s degrees at four-year institutions.

Quainoo called winning the scholarship an “Infinity War moment,” referring to the Marvel Avengers movie. He said it was a big moment where everything changed, likening the experience to the scene in the movie when the villain Thanos snaps his fingers and wipes out half of all life in the universe.

In Quainoo’s case, though, it was a change for good, and a testament to his hard work in the Honors College at Georgia State, where he received outstanding research and top engineering student awards. Now he’s giving back as a teaching assistant for Perimeter College in college algebra and elementary statistics.

“I want to make an impact on people; it is my purpose in the world,” he said.

Quainoo has been working toward his goal of becoming an aerospace engineer for years, pouring his passion into classes and community service at Perimeter College, but he said it seems like no time has passed from first seeing an airplane to experiencing classes and community at Georgia Tech. And now that he understands how planes fly, he’s looking forward to studying drones, aviation technology, and “wherever else my curiosity leads,” he said.

And though he’s at the other end of those 5,000 miles from Ghana, Quainoo still draws inspiration from his family.

“We are hard workers. The things they have been through have been challenging, so I do it for them,” he said. “I know I want to be somewhere important and make a big change in this community, and that’s what keeps me going.”