1/ When my US-based Nigerian engineer childhood friend sent me a message last year that he wanted to institute a small scholarship where he would sponsor the cost of GRE/GMAT of a few Nigerian students wishing to get scholarship to study in North America, I wondered why anyone...
2/...would not be able to raise $226 (N80k last year, now N100k) to pay for GRE test. I had believed, elitist in retrospect, that any serious grad, even the one doing teaching, should be able to raise N80k to write a test that would open them to thousand $ foreign scholarships
3/ As he was in the US, he outsourced the application & screening process to Lagos-based JarusHub, my career & education resource platform. We were to send the screening test scores to him for interview of the best performing candidates from where he would choose the final 5
4/ When drafting the post to publish to call for applications, I added “While the cost of registering for GRE is small, it is observed that many Nigerian students are not able to afford it”. He changed to “While the cost may appear small ...” He probably would have removed that.
5/ I didn’t know that this friend, having been involved in informally guiding many Nigerian students on international school admission, even before instituting GRE fee scholarship, had seen a lot. Until the process started and we reviewed applicants on need & brilliance
6/ He had to extend the number of candidates to sponsor from 5 to 8 last year, and further expanding to up to 15 this year. Getting involved in this process made me realize there are so many brilliant graduates from poor homes across Nigeria.
7/ The height was the one we interviewed yesterday and we were crying after the interview. Poverty written all over his face, even in his English intonation, lost his father 11 yrs ago, farming in the village, never visited Lagos, teaching in a school but stopped by covid 19
8/ This was someone that graduated with a CGPA > 4.9, 2nd best in a 1st generation federal university. Finished NYSC few months ago. He said without this scholarship, he would have needed years to raise $226 GRE fee.
8.1 This guy was a national math competition medalist. The sponsor being a mathematician himself had to utter “Suraj, that’s no joke! To be among top 3 in a mathematics competition in Nigeria? C’mon, Suraj, this guy is damn good”.
9/ At some point during the interview, the sponsor could not talk again, fighting back tears. I fought mine enough to be able to close the interview. The 3rd panelist, a White American, could not relate much with our emotion, due to a combination of difficulty in hearing the ...
10/ ...the village-interfered intonation of the young man and non-relatability of the severity of the poverty oozing from the young man. “How can we talking about farming in this kind of interview when we should be talking about coding, data etc?”, the sponsor managed to utter.
11/ “This guy should be in different stage of interview of top companies in Nigeria now, with right exposure”, the career enthusiast in me added. Even the schools he aims to study in the US, when asked where he wanted to study if he did well in GRE, were tier-3 schools.
12/ This guy should be aiming the most competitive schools in the world, he is good enough for them, I told my friend. My friend, himself an extremely brilliant guy with 1st class from Ife and PhD without masters from a top US school, called this young man a genius.
13/ For him to call another person a genius, I know how good the person must be. Well, I told him, in closing, you may have a future star in your hand.
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