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Six students from Georgia State University’s Perimeter College have been named semifinalists for the 2025 Jack Kent Cooke Undergraduate Transfer Scholarship. The Jack Kent Cooke award is a competitive scholarship for the nation’s top two-year college students. It provides recipients with up to $55,000 per year, placing the scholarship among the largest private awards in the country for community college transfer students. The semifinalists, all Perimeter Honors College students working toward their associate degrees, are among 467 individuals selected from more than 1,600 applicants attending 212 community colleges in 43 states, plus Washington, D.C., and the Northern Mariana Islands. The following is a profile of one of Perimeter's semifinalists.
CLARKSTON, Ga. — On a Friday afternoon in April, Soe Wai Yan could be found with a giant pile of cardboard, two rolls of duct tape, a utility knife and a team of four classmates. The challenge at hand? Making a boat out of cardboard large enough to hold a college student and water-tight enough to go from one end of the 25-yard pool to the other in a race against other teams.
The Cardboard Regatta, an annual tradition on the Clarkston Campus, is part of STEM Week at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College. Yan’s team didn’t win first place, but its boat almost survived the 25 yards before becoming too waterlogged to continue. Regardless, everyone involved in the engineering challenge clearly had great fun.
A few days earlier, Yan won twice at the annual Perimeter College STAR Awards, which honors outstanding student performance. Yan received The Dean’s Award as well as The Student Leadership Excellence Award, an honor he shared with classmate and fellow Cardboard Regatta teammate, Sut Naw.
The Dean’s Award is the highest honor of the ceremony, recognizing a student who has demonstrated attributes of a leader through actions and character. The Student Leadership Excellence Award recognizes a student who has made significant contributions to the Perimeter College community through leadership and service.
“The Dean's Award reminded me that all those late nights with little sleep were worth it," Yan said of this great achievement.
It's easy to see why Yan was chosen for both awards. He has a 4.0 GPA, more than 70 credit hours, and has served as president of the Clarkston Math Club, which he revived and turned into a vibrant community with more than 100 members. Yan has organized events to help his team prepare for a major math competition, as well as a 3D printing workshop, an origami lab, a walking robot lab and a curiosity lab field trip.
To provide additional opportunities for Perimeter College students, Yan invited guests from Georgia State’s Atlanta Campus to visit. Representatives from the Center for the Advancement of Students and Alumni (CASA) shared information about paid research programs, and representatives from the Advanced Research Computing Technology & Innovation Core (ARCTIC) presented on the use of computer vision in student research.
As a math and physics tutor at the Clarkston Tutoring Center, Yan has hosted more than 500 tutoring sessions in the last year. He has volunteered with the Perimeter College Outreach team, assisting more than 20 Clarkston High School students with STEM Lab activities, he has coordinated events for the Clarkston Computing and Engineering Club, and he also has served as a university-wide senator for the Student Government Association this school year.
"I love to improve the world around me with what I can do," said Yan of his tutoring and volunteer commitments.
Yan has been active on many team projects during his time at Perimeter, including working to develop a school bus tracking app, which won first place in the 2024 Perimeter College Innovative Challenge Competition. He is involved in the CORE research program, and in early April, his team presented their findings, called 'Developing a Low-Cost Arduino-Based Colorimetric Soil Tester for Precise Nutrient Analysis,’ at the 2025 National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) in Pittsburgh.
Yan moved to the United States in 2022 after a military coup occurred in his home country of Myanmar. Feeling that the move would give him more opportunities, he started school on the west coast and moved from California to Atlanta in 2023 to live with a family member and attend Perimeter College.
Yan said he specifically chose Perimeter after hearing how much Perimeter professors care about their students. He has found this to be true and credits his achievement and success to the kindness and guidance professors have offered him.
Receiving the Jack Kent Cooke scholarship would allow Yan to continue his education at one of the prestigious institutions to which he has applied, a list that includes Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.
Yan wants to study computer engineering with a focus on robotics and plans to continue building community within his field.
The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation will announce its 2025 scholarship recipient in May.
Story by Christy Petterson
Photo by Bill Roa