UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As a boy growing up in Sri Lanka, Pavara Ranatunga was intrigued by airplanes. When he’d hear the whir of a jet engine from inside his house, he’d run outside to see the plane flying overhead. The way those large metal objects could fly like birds fascinated him.
Because of a life-changing decision his parents made, Ranatunga has made a career out of working with flying objects, and his work today supports the International Space Station.
Ranatunga’s parents left Sri Lanka in 2004 and emigrated to the United States. They wanted to give him and his sister access to an American education and, as they hoped, the security to live a better life than they would have had if they stayed in Sri Lanka.
“My parents sacrificed their entire livelihood that they had back home to give my sister and me a better education,” Ranatunga said. “As any immigrant family, we struggled early on, but they made sure that my needs were met so that I could focus on going to school and being successful where I needed to be.”
Today, Ranatunga is flying high, like those planes that have always fascinated him. He has a bachelor of science in aerospace engineering, a master of engineering in systems engineering, both from Penn State; a job in the aerospace industry; and he is working toward an MBA online through Penn State World Campus.
A bachelor’s degree helped him take off toward his parents’ wishes
The Ranatungas settled near family in the Pittsburgh area. His parents, who had professional jobs in Sri Lanka, initially found minimum-wage jobs in the U.S. while he and his sister adjusted to their new home and worked hard in school.
In middle school, Ranatunga took a personality test to gauge majors to explore for college. His score showed an aptitude for engineering, and that’s when he discovered he could channel his fascination for planes into a college major, aerospace engineering. He studied that major through the College of Engineering at Penn State’s University Park campus. He later landed a co-op that gave him valuable experience and graduated with a bachelor of science in aerospace engineering in 2016.
Failing, let alone settling for a back-up major that wasn’t engineering, wasn’t an option because of the sacrifice his parents made, he said. He didn’t want to let them down.
“Now that I look back on it, that's really what drove me,” Ranatunga said. “I didn’t want to be something else. I didn’t want to go back and say, ‘I regret not being an engineer,’ because I absolutely love what I get to do today.”