Ngozi Chukwu’s earliest childhood memory is of writing a song on her balcony. She was in her first year of secondary school, maybe 11 or 12 years old. She had moved to a new secondary school and was having a terrible time. So she went home and wrote. The song had a Hannah Montana beat. It is still in her head.
Years later, she would win multiple writing prizes at a petroleum company’s summer camp. But she never imagined that media was something she would do.
“It seemed to me a thing that was natural to me, to be able to write things, poems, compositions, essays,” she says. “So I thought that the harder thing was science, engineering.”
She studied electronic engineering at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Enugu State, one of Nigeria’s premier federal universities.
When engineering killed the joy
Chukwu had started university excited. Then came her first laboratory class, and it was terrible for her.
“It was obvious to me that this lab was not for 2013,” she says. “There was no space for us to breathe. I can’t explain to you how deeply my heart sank. I gave up on school.”
That is where she says she lost her spirit. Not the joy of learning—the joy of classes, of school, of the structure she thought would guide her. She started spending time at the art faculty instead and became interested in social impact. She volunteered as a grant writer for a non-governmental organisation (NGO).
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