Tech graduate looks into long-range future

BLACKSBURG - After two years' separation from her family in Ghana, Kokui Adu was counting the days until she could walk off that airplane - a master's degree from Virginia Tech in her hand - and resume the role of mother to her two little girls. She would get a good finance job in her native Ghana, a country on Africa's western coast, and eventually return to the classroom.

Or so that was the plan.

Instead, Friday and Saturday's pomp and circumstance in Blacksburg - during which Adu and 4,751 others received degrees - signaled another year of separation between Adu and family. Rather than heading back to her home in Ghana's capital city, Accra, Adu is headed to another entirely foreign place - New Jersey - to train with a consulting firm. She plans to transfer later to one of the company's offices in Ghana.

Adu and her husband seem to view life through the same telescopic lens, looking at the long-range future rather than the immediate.

"He said, 'We've made sacrifices for your education, and if the experience is going to help you get a job, we will make another sacrifice as well,'" Kokui (pronounced Kok-wee) Adu said, recounting her husband's reaction to her job offer in the United States.

For Adu and her husband, Kwabena, those sacrifices will do more than just further her professional career. The couple views Kokui's pursuit of her MBA as an investment in their daughters' futures, not to mention the futures of countless Ghanian girls in desperate need of female role models.

Ghana is a traditional patriarchal society, meaning that few females receive higher education, Adu said. Attitudes are changing in Ghana's urban areas, but education reform has been slower among rural populations, she said.

After working a few years in the private sector, Adu hopes to teach finance or business at the university level and earn her doctorate. Adu said she hopes her presence as both a professor and a successful businesswoman will help convince girls that they have a future outside of the home, if they so choose.

"Every minute has been worth it," said Adu, who also studied as an undergraduate at Tech in 1998. "I realized that every good thing comes from hard work and having to make sacrifices. And anything that comes easy is not worth it."

That was a theme echoed throughout Tech's 130th commencement Saturday. Gov. Mark Warner, addressing the more than 3,500 undergraduates and estimated 20,000-plus spectators gathered at Lane Stadium, urged the graduates to stay connected with their roots but to work hard to make a difference in the new knowledge- and technology-based economy.

"When you leave here, you will go out into a world full of turmoil and an economy in transition," Warner said. "You leave the comfort of this campus and go out into the hard reality of the real world. ... Many of you have fond memories of the starting salaries your upperclassmen friends received upon graduation just a few years ago.

"Well, the signing bonuses may not be as high, but the opportunities are just as great. Welcome to the new economy."

Of course, living an ocean away from her loved ones was not easy for Adu. Her modest apartment complex is quiet and anti-social compared to neighborhoods in her home country. Rather than the hustle of Accra with its 2 million inhabitants, the view from Adu's living room window is of cows grazing across the street.

Other challenges involved getting by without a car, being a 40-year-old student among classmates in their early 20s, and adjusting to American culture, including the food.

"It's been very difficult, being away from my two daughters," 11-year-old Pokuaa and 14-year-old Asantewah, Adu said. "I've gone through some very lonesome moments."

But she made friends and grew to love Blacksburg. The family keeps a religious weekly phone schedule: 30 minutes together as a family each Sunday (at $12 a call), followed by a few three-minute calls from her husband throughout the week. When they can, they rent a computer at a neighborhood chat cafe in Accra to send their mother e-mails.

Adu has also been home to Ghana twice since 2000, but she was unable to secure visas for her daughters to visit. "They understand what I'm trying to do," Adu said of her daughters.

To help pay her expenses, Adu worked as a graduate assistant this year for finance professor George Morgan in the Pamplin College of Business. Morgan, who has known Adu since 1998, described her as a diligent worker who marvels in the differences between Ghana and the United States rather than letting them become obstacles.

"She's just an amazing person," Morgan said, "in terms of her internal strength and her ability to do all of these things and make these sacrifices."