*A Nigerian-American teenager is making national headlines after being accepted to 15 universities.
Rotimi Kukoyi of Alabama has received acceptance letters from Harvard and Johns Hopkins and more than $2 million in scholarship offers, per Good Morning America.
Kukoyi was inspired to apply to multiple universities after appearing on “Jeopardy!” Teen Tournament as a freshman in 2018.
“It was really fun experience but also put me in contact with some pretty cool students from across the country,” Kukoyi said. “A lot of them are older and they’re like seniors or juniors that applied to many prestigious schools a lot of them are attending prestigious universities now. So that was kind of my original inspiration to apply to those universities.”
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Kukoyi announced on social media that he was accepted into 15 universities, including Stanford, Yale, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, Vanderbilt, Emory, Rice, Duke, the University of Alabama, Case Western Reserve University, UAB, Auburn University and Washington University in St. Louis.
Kukoyi will attend UNC Chapel Hill on the school’s Morehead-Cain Scholarship, where he will pursue a career in public health, per the report.
Last summer Kukoyi and three others won a state-sponsored TikTok contest to encourage students to get vaccinated against COVID-19. “So why did I get the vaccine? This is my why,” he said in the video’s caption. “COVID deaths shouldn’t be normalized,” he added. “The vaccines are safe and effective.”
“COVID really sparked [my interest in public health] because that was the first time that I really saw how clear the health inequities were,” Kukoyi told ABC news. “African Americans had a much higher chance of dying from COVID than white Americans … it was almost like there were two separate pandemics impacting our nation, and we saw [some people] marginalized and impacted way more.”
Kukoyi hopes his story inspires other students to apply to schools that may seem unattainable.
“A lot of kids that I talked to didn’t think they could apply to the bigger schools or get into the bigger schools” or were concerned about the costs, he said. “But there are other resources available to students to kind of help with that.”
“… A lot of those more competitive schools offer much more extensive financial aid than state schools,” he added.
Nigerian-American Teen, Rotimi Kukoyi has been accepted into 15 top universities in USA, and received scholarships worth $2 million.
They include Harvard, Yale, Stanford, North Carolina, Virginia, Vanderbilt, Emory, Rice, Johns Hopkins, Duke, Alabama, Case Western Reserve, UAB pic.twitter.com/zNYXYIE0x7
— Africa Facts Zone (@AfricaFactsZone) June 18, 2022
Per the report, Kukoyi has teamed with his fellow National Merit finalists to set up free tutoring for teens preparing to take the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test.
“… I feel like a lot of the disparities that we see with standardized testing are because these underrepresented minorities in low-income communities often can’t afford the same levels of [test preparation] that their wealthier counterparts get,” he said. “So by establishing free tutoring programs, that could kind of help to equalize the playing field.”
Kukoyi wants his “legacy to be one that’s focused on impacting other people.”
“I suppose a lot of people in the pursuit of their own goals can kind of forget what it’s all about,” he added.
