All my life, I've only written exams in two languages - English and Yoruba.
I have just stepped out of an exam hall where I had to write it's entirety in Italian.
Pass rate for Indigenous Italians is 58%.
8 out of 10 immigrants fail.
I wrote on first trial and made 100%.
My two friends and I were hunting for scholarships back then. They gained admission ahead of me, but despite that, we stayed in touch.
They kept sending me scholarship links and checking up on my progress. Before sending the final draft of my SOP to one of my mentors, I would first send it to them to review. Their feedback was always helpful.
One day, during a random conversation about the process, I casually mentioned that I still needed to pay for my WES evaluation. Guess what? One of my friends told the others, and without even informing me, they contributed money together and sent it to me.
Wow! Just wow!
That gesture meant so much to me.
The scholarship journey can be draining, discouraging, and lonely at times. But with like-minded friends around you, you are far more likely to keep going. If I may say, your friends are also great resources in the journey, so make the most of them.
Keep company with friends who align with your goals and vision, friends who are generous with information and genuinely want to see you win, not those who hoard opportunities from you. And importantly, be that kind of friend too.
A year later, by God’s grace, I got mine as well.
And that is one beautiful thing about life: until we all win, none of us has truly won.
Bananas are such convenient fruits like no chopping or washing needed, not sticky, no juice dripping around and they come with their own biodegradable packaging. A 10/10 in my books
Back in 100 Level, I was the guy. Girls flocked around me, always trying to tap from my brain. They would come to my house to “learn,” beg me to organize tutorials, and act like I was their academic life support. I actually enjoyed teaching.
Fast-forward to 300 Level second semester: The same girls who used to sit attentively with notebooks now barely look my way unless it’s transactional. They stopped wanting knowledge. They just wanted grades. Many had started dating Yahoo boys, and suddenly money became the shortcut.
I offered to properly teach one of them a course that was hard for them. She said “No, just let me pay you. I’ll come and sit beside you in the exam hall".
That line alone should tell you everything.
If only people could see the real damage Yahoo Yahoo is doing, not just to society, but to an entire generation of young men and women who traded self-respect, ambition, and actual intelligence for quick cash and fake lifestyle. They didn’t just stop learning. They stopped believing they could. And that’s the part that hurts the most.
We’re not just losing students. We’re losing futures. 😩
A year from now, at this exact time, I’ll be sitting in rooms I once only dreamed about. I’ll look back and realize how far I’ve come, how much changed, and how everything aligned. The wins will be massive.
@Wizarab10 I graduated with a CGPA of 4.44.
I understand how you feel, this is not the end, your 4.45 can still go a long way for you, you just need access to the right information.
During the mid 1800s, it was a miracle to live past 10. In Europe alone, nearly half of children died before age five. Men like John Snow in the 1850s went to work with their minds, rigorously finding solutions. Science is why such deaths are no longer the case today.
Some people think science is too abstract. But it isn’t, it’s embedded in the very fact that most of us survived childhood. The modern world we live in, is an anomaly, not the default. We live in a historically rare window of safety and predictability, built atop layers of cumulative knowledge.
I always say that the reason people don’t appreciate science enough is because it has a name and it has humans as its pioneers. The magic of the 20th and 21st century has not been any one religion. It has been the sheer will of men to create beauty and leave behind a world much safer and better than they met it.
Human progress has never been automatic. It has always been dragged uphill by minds willing to wrestle with mystery, to think rigorously, to sacrifice comfort for understanding. To turn child death into child life. To make water safe. To banish smallpox. To see beyond superstition into the microbial world. Every comfort we now take for granted was once the hard-won fruit of long, lonely intellectual labor.
But the interesting paradox is that these developments must have been inspired by something greater than the pioneers themselves. For Newton to spend a lifetime decoding the cosmos, or Pasteur to obsess over unseen germs, or Curie to endure radiation for discovery, they had to believe that understanding reality was inherently worthwhile, that knowledge serves life, that the human condition is something to elevate, not merely endure. I suppose there is an instinct is spiritual in nature and pulled towards a transcendent meaning. Whatever religion that leads a man is his prerogative if only he recognizes that the religion itself is merely a construct for spiritual longing.