A gifted and brilliant Nigerian-American student, Rotimi Kukoyi has gained admission into all of the top 15 universities in the United States after his record-breaking performance in high school.
Rotimi who attended Hoover High School in Glendale, Alabama emerged as the best graduating student in the school. He narrated that being born to Nigerian immigrants, he has always been inspired to graduate high school in the United States.
“As a child of immigrants who came to the United States to secure a better future for themselves and their children through the American education system, I’ve always aspired to graduate from high school,” he wrote on Instagram.
“The past 13 years of hard work have paid off, and I’m incredibly optimistic for what lies ahead. I’m thankful to the close relationships that have supported me throughout this journey, and I’m excited to watch my friends continue to succeed from afar,” he added.
As a result of his outstanding performance, Rotimi was awarded admission into all the Ivy League including Harvard University, Yale Unversity, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt and Duke University, among others with a scholarship worth over $2 million per outlet.
Rotimi also set a new outstanding record for Blacks in the school after emerging the first-ever Black National Merit Scholar of the school.
He ultimately decided to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States where he will, study to attain a Bachelor’s Degree in Health Policy and Management using the school’s prestigious Morehead-Cain Scholarship.
“With this scholarship, I’m able to choose the path less traveled by—the road not taken—and define my own journey. And have it all paid for,” Kukoyi wrote on Instagram. “At UNC, I hope to lay the foundations of a career driving health equity in our nation.”
Speaking on his decision to enrol for a health-related course, Kukoyi said he was inspired in part by the pandemic. He wants his legacy to be about helping people, he told ABC News.
“C-O-V-I-D really sparked [my interest in public health] because that was the first time that I really saw how clear the health inequities were. African Americans had a much higher chance of dying from COVID than white Americans,” Kukoyi told ABC news.
“It was almost like there were two separate pandemics impacting our nation, and we saw [some people] marginalized and impacted way more,” he added.