Pickleball player Vaughn Paape once made potato guns in his carpenter dad’s garages; in July, he’ll begin his first post-college job as a nuclear engineer at the Pearl Harbor naval base in Oahu, Hawaii.
The Grand Canyon University mechanical engineering major capped his undergraduate journey at this morning’s commencement ceremony at Global Credit Union Arena – the first of five ceremonies for traditional students spanning three days, with seven more for online and cohort students Tuesday to May 2.
Paape’s journey to Pearl Harbor began in the farm community of Grant Park, Illinois, in northeastern Kankakee County, known for producing soybeans and corn. But as the son of a carpenter, he would work for his dad when he wasn’t tackling cantankerous math equations or wrangling with a science concept at the kitchen table as a home-school student.
He'd been home-schooled since the third grade, when his aptitude for those subjects exceeded what his parents felt public school could offer him.
It was there, at home, over the rural Illinois summers, that he’d have free reign over his dad’s tools.
“Me and my brother were always building some sort of contraption, like a potato cannon or a catapult or something like that,” said Paape. “I’ve always been intrigued by things like that. My dad would bring home old compressors that were broken. I’d take the motor out of it and make the motor into something else.
“I was home-schooled, so I had a lot of free time on my hands,” Paape said with a smile.
All those garage-centric, hands-on tinkering opportunities kept him engaged until high school, when he asked his mom if he could return to traditional public school.
“I felt isolated at home,” he said, though he grew up in a house bustling with foster children whom his parents welcomed and helped along on their own journeys, some of them with very tough stories. “We lived in the middle of nowhere – no neighbors or anyone. The only time I saw people during the week was at church, so I was like, ‘Mom, I want to go back.’”
And soon after that, it was off to Arizona, where older brother Blake, far removed from the soybeans, corn and potato cannons, moved to Tucson for a medical device sales job. And Paape, practical as he is, knew he would have somewhere to stay while he looked for schools.
He visited the big state schools, which were a no for him. GCU, he liked.
Tinkering in his dad’s garage being such a part of his history, and with his dad gently nudging him away from carpentry – “It’s hard on the body,” Paape said – he knew engineering was what he wanted to do.
“If you’re good at math and you’re good at science, they just tell you that you should probably want to go into engineering.”
He couldn’t think of a more engaging place to be, especially when his professor, Dr. Luke Mayer, a 2024 Campus KEEN Rising Star award winner, surprised his class with a unique lesson in fluid mechanics.
“He somehow got us to go indoor skydiving for free,” Paape said, adding that a big part of his success has been the faculty.
“The professors here are great … if you pick the right ones, they really help you outside the classroom, as well.”
He credited his professors with helping him land the summer engineering internships that would lead to Pearl Harbor.
He squeezed three of them into his schedule before senior year – two alone in the summer between his freshman and sophomore years, one as an electrical engineering intern with Zona Technical Engineering.
“I got to make the electrical layout for a new electrician apprenticeship school down in Tucson,” Paape said.
That was followed that same summer by an engineering internship with American Turbo Systems, also in Tucson. And last summer, he launched into a five-month stint at Phoenix’s Collins Aerospace as a quality intern.
Paape credits that rich vein of internships, in part, to his professors, though one, Steven Kryk, said he owes a little of his GCU experience to Paape, too.
“When I had my job interview two years ago at GCU, I knew Vaughn was a student here,” said Kryk, who got to know Paape’s older brother after moving to Arizona during the pandemic. “After my interview, I stayed around for a few hours while he showed me the campus and tried to convince me to take the offer. I am so happy I accepted it and started this unbelievable journey in my life – and I don’t know what would have happened had I not known anyone on campus and not seen his view of this unique university.”
During the school year, Paape worked for GCU Facilities. He touted a particular skill the department liked – AutoCAD, a computer-aided design software that he learned to use in one of his internships.
And he touts one more particular skill that impressed his new employers, the U.S. Department of Defense.
The summer of his freshman year, with no homework to do after his internship, he said, “I was so bored … There were (pickleball) courts five minutes away from my brother’s house, where I was living, so I started going there. I really liked it. I told my brother, you’ve got to check it out – it’s so fun. We ended up going almost every night for the entire summer.”
Paape joined the club sports pickleball team his sophomore year. He and family friend Kryk, who had yet to become his engineering professor, won the first GCU pickleball intramural championship, defeating 219 teams. And this year, Paape and his teammate took home the gold medal in the mixed doubles amateur division at the Professional Pickleball Association’s tournament in Mesa, Arizona.
Kryk became Paape’s professor this year, when he needed two courses to graduate, and Kryk was the only professor who taught those courses.
“I got to see a better and new side of him,” Kryk said. “I saw a natural leader in the classroom … His understanding of course material was immediate.”
Paape a couple of weeks ago culminated his undergraduate career at GCU at the 368-student-strong College of Engineering and Technology capstone showcase.
“We were outside of the showcase cooking popcorn,” he said of his team’s solar cooking stone, which charges with solar thermal energy during the day and can be brought inside during the evening to use for cooking. The team attached a lens to a vacuum-insulated box filled with sand, which can be heated to 450 degrees.
“So for people in Ethiopia or Kenya, they don’t have to start a fire,” he said of places in the world where wood is not plentiful.
Paape will start his job in Hawaii in July, an ocean away from the farms of Grant Park, Illinois.
He connected with the U.S. Department of Defense at one of GCU Career Services’ job fairs. When recruiters called him four months later to ask if he wanted to interview, he said, “I couldn’t turn down that opportunity.”
His internships helped him, of course, though the federal job is so specialized he said he’ll be learning most everything on the spot.
“The funny thing is, I put on my resume, pickleball. … They saw that and were asking me about it. I guess they must have really liked that.”
Manager of internal communications Lana Sweeten-Shults can be reached at lana.sweetenshults@gcu.edu or at 602-639-7901.
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