As the son of a woman from the slow, gentle plains of Kansas and a man from the bustling streets of Lagos, Nigeria, I was born into two different worlds. The Midwest and the Igbo tribe of Nigeria have two distinctly different cultures and I often experienced this cultural clash when I was growing up. My father had come to the United States to attend university and education was essential to him, leading both of my parents to always push me to be excellent in my school work. Even during the summer months, I had things to do. They put me in music and language lessons and made sure I spent plenty of time each day learning so I wouldn’t regress during my time off from school. This instilled in me a strong work ethic and a desire for excellence in everything, including academics. My desire for excellence in academics led me to challenge myself in school, in the form of taking as many AP classes as I could, and learning as much about computers and the fields of computer science and cybersecurity as I could. When I was eight years old, I received a book called Coding for Beginners using Scratch as a Christmas gift from my parents. It was the first time I had heard of programming, and I soon grew to love the subject. I quickly tried out all of the exercises in the book and started creating my own programs. Over the next few years, a passion for computers and programming blossomed and grew to encompass many different facets of computer science, like cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. Computers have always fascinated me because of the sheer volume of problems they can solve, and the duality of their nature. They're cold, precise, and perfectly logical, but at the same time, they're able to produce in people feelings of incredible warmth and connection, through being able to video call a relative, or something silly like watching cat videos on YouTube. I plan to attend the University of Kansas in the fall, majoring in computer science, with a minor in astronomy. Receiving the Dr. Soronnadi Nnaji Legacy Scholarship would alleviate some of the financial burdens that attending university brings, and would allow me to focus more on my education, and worry less about funding it. Being able to attend university without a large financial burden would allow me to give back to my community, to give back where others have supported me and gotten me to where I am today. Currently, I volunteer, serving on my church worship team and supporting families by offering free childcare, and my junior year of high school I served as Humanitarian Lead on the Student Council Executive team, organizing monthly donations and community service projects. In the future I would like to give back philanthropically, giving money as well as time. Growing up in an immigrant household taught me the value of hard work and excellence, but also the value of family and laughter, and I'd like to share the lessons I learned growing up with others.

I grew up the second of fifteen cousins. In the rather small town I grew up in, I was constantly surrounded by family, and we saw each other quite often. Growing up, I would mostly hang out with my cousins; school friends were just for school. We saw each other all the time, so we never had to put in effort into making deeper connections. Also, I was, and still am an introvert. At this point in my life, I was perfectly content being by myself and hadn’t yet realized how important friends are. I was perfectly content not having any real friends besides my cousins. Then came the pandemic. School shut down and (almost) everyone stayed home. Then we moved cities at the beginning of my freshman year of high school. For the first year after we moved I did online school, and my mental health started to decline. For the first time in my life, I was lonely. I started feeling less and less pleasure in doing things I normally enjoyed. Before this, school had come easily. Now it was a daily struggle to force myself out of bed, to force myself to work on the growing mountain of homework I had accumulated. Every day became a struggle, and I couldn't see how I was going to make it through the school year. Eventually I made it to the end, and my report card showed the signs of my battle. I thought the summer would fix everything, but it didn't. I was still lonely, and didn't have interest in doing anything. As I made it through the summer and the next school year came around, our family found a school. As I started to make friends, I watched my mental health improve drastically, and I came to a powerful realization that many already know, yet take for granted: Everyone needs friends. My experiences taught me how to make friends and that only outside our comfort zones can we achieve true growth. At first I was content with leaving my school friends at school, but now I've learned how important to put effort into friendships, to build them outside of a specific setting. Understanding the struggle of not having friends, I strive to be the person that other can come to, to be the person who looks out for the lonely, to be a friend to the friendless.

Growing up as part of two cultures, I often felt as though I belonged to neither. I didn’t want to be the center of attention, I simply wanted to find a box to fit in and be completely normal. As the son of a woman from the slow, gentle plains of Kansas and a man from the bustling streets of Lagos, Nigeria, I was born into two different worlds. The Midwest and the Igbo tribe of Nigeria have two distinctly different cultures and I often experienced this cultural clash when I was growing up. My father had come to the United States to attend university and education was extremely important to him, leading both of my parents to always push me to be excellent in my school work. Even during the summer months, I had things to do. They put me in music and language lessons and made sure I spent plenty of time each day learning so I wouldn’t regress during my time off from school. From preschool up until my sophomore year of high school, I lived in a town and went to school where everyone looked like one another, but no one looked like me. I was raised in the small town of Pittsburg, Kansas. I spent the first 13 years of my life there, where my skin seemed very out of place. Whether we like it or not, we are often defined by things we did not choose, and our skin is no exception. As a child, I hated my skin color and wished I could change it to be like everyone else around me. It didn’t help that my classmates in elementary school made fun of my brown skin. It does seem strange to me now that I wished I could be white, but their words stung and I wanted to fit in. As I got older, with the help of some people who also looked different, I began to accept that I looked different and began to embrace my skin. I realized that a world where everyone looked like each other was a very dull place, and I wanted no part of it. I was able to discover that growing up between two different cultures was a blessing, not a curse. Instead of putting myself into a box others have created, I define myself by my own terms. I’ve learned to be welcoming to people different from me and open-minded about new cultures and discovering new things. I discovered that it was okay and even amazing that I didn’t fit into the boxes created for me by society. I also realized that lots of people also didn’t feel comfortable in the boxes they were put in. I now feel comfortable in my own skin, and wish to help others come to the same level of self-acceptance.