A Boy’s Curiosity, Imagination, and a Creative Mind: How My Son’s Passion for Aircraft Design Emerged 

By Clement Abai

This post hits home as my son is about to leave for college. But before I continue, I would like to thank everyone who was involved in Keke’s growth as a student, as a person, and as an athlete, and also take this time to share a short story about how his dream of becoming a mechanical and aerospace engineer flourished.

Keke’s passion for designing aircraft started at an early age when he tried to make sense of how paper planes fly. This led to his curiosity about becoming a mechanical and aerospace engineer so he can design a plane one day. It all started one summer evening when we were playing outside our apartment complex and I decided to make a paper plane and launched it into the air as he watched. To his surprise, the plane glided and he chased it down until it landed. I remembered how excited he was at that moment. To me, it was a fun and joyful father, son moment. I was thrilled to see him filled with excitement because of how the paper plane caught his attention and made him feel happy. I remembered how he held the paper plane between his right thumb and pointer finger, turning it from side to side, and looking at it as though he was studying it before launching it into the air. What I did NOT realize and understand at that moment was that creating a simple working plane out of paper sparked his curiosity and imagination about how planes fly. As the days, weeks, and months passed, I started noticing the pages in my notebook missing. It turns out Keke had been ripping the pages out of my notebook to make paper planes. Noticing his interest and desire to design paper planes, Mumbe and I bought him a book on how to make different paper planes and also enrolled him in various STEM programs to challenge him and help him grow his passion. Fast forward to high school. When Keke started making his own decisions about his future and started seeking guidance and advice to pursue mechanical and aerospace engineering in college, he realized that to reach his dream, he had to sacrifice some things he enjoy doing, work twice as hard to keep up with his academic demands, do extra work outside of school and rely on the support system. This support system includes us parents, his academic counselors, teachers, and coaches at Stillwater Public Schools and at the Meridian Technology Center, his mentors at the Unmanned Systems Research Institute at Oklahoma State University, friends and families, and others who helped support him academically and athletically. By navigating through all these resources and staying focused, he was able to achieve his goals for high school. Below are some of his accomplishments. 

• 2 x Technology Student Association (TSA) State Champion (Flight Category) 
• TSA  National Qualifier (Flight Category). 
• 1st Place Nationally for the NASA Hunch Project (Team Project). 
• FAA Certified Commercial Drone Pilot.

Now that he is ready to leave Stillwater and move across the country to attend college as a student-athlete to pursue his engineering degree at Boston University and play soccer, I have to remind myself that as parents, Mumbe and I are taking him to Boston NOT as our teenage son but as a God-fearing young man whom we have prepared well for the last 17 years, ready to face the challenges that come with life in general, as well as the ones that come with the life faced by student-athletes. 

The last couple of weeks have been bittersweet for Mumbe, Keke’s younger sister, and me as we prepared to make the trip to Boston. We are looking forward to the challenges, the fun, and what lies ahead. To everyone who has been involved in Keke’s growth academically and athletically, thank you so much again.  And to all the fathers and mothers, especially the young parents, it’s worth doing the small things with your children while they are young. Enjoy those moments because they come and go by so fast. And who knows? Maybe playing those fun games that spark the curiosity of your little boy or little girl will one day lead to something greater.