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I got into university at fourteen and very nearly did not survive it. Four months into MTN’s MIP-5, here is everything the School of Media and Communication has given the woman I became.
In May, I was admitted as a fellow into the fifth cohort of MTN’s Media Innovation Programme, in collaboration with Pan-Atlantic University, MTN MIP-5. When I announced my admission on my social media accounts, I was met with the expected barrage of congratulatory texts, well wishes, and encouragement. After the pleasantries had run their course, I was left alone with a far less celebratory question: Denise, what exactly have you gotten yourself into this time?
To the people who know me, or have witnessed me, that probably reads as an odd thing to worry about. This is Denise, after all. The youngest Editor-in-Chief in the Marie Claire global network. The girl who took a gap year, moved to Big Ol’ Lasgidi, a nickname I thoroughly despise, for an internship at Zaron Cosmetics, and simply never stopped. EatDrinkLagos Denise. ART X Denise. Chowdeck Denise. The one-million-things-doing Denise. From the outside, I am not someone who hesitates. But there is a version of me most people rarely see, and many more do not even know exists at all: the Denise who meets fear head-on and, rather than running from it, waits for it to pass — because it always does. But I have not always known how to hold fear this gently. There was a time it simply won.
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I struggled in my undergraduate years
In the first semester of my second year, I failed woefully. Two As in my literature courses, and beneath them, five Fs. It was one of the worst results I have ever received. I was fifteen at the time. I remember looking at it with little drama, honestly, I didn’t feel any shame. And that’s because I was tired. Beneath that tiredness lay the plain, almost irritating knowledge that I could do better. The burning question at that time was: how on earth am I going to find the energy to be better?
I had been admitted to university at fourteen. When it comes up in conversation, people look at me with a kind of awe, as though it were a trophy I earned, rather than a responsibility I was handed before I knew what to do with it. And I understand the awe. I am aware that I am reaping the favour of having started my life early, of being ahead in a way that keeps compounding. But I want to be honest about something the awe tends to skip over: I am simply one of the people who survived that level of responsibility at that age. Not everyone does. I very nearly did not.
That failed semester was the year everything in me was in revolt at once. My body was changing, my hormones were raging, and I was trying to navigate it all inside an environment that had no room for a girl smack in the middle of becoming. I was depressed. Eventually, I stopped going to class. One skipped morning became one skipped week, a slow erosion compounding. I would lie in bed and watch the day happen to other people. The two As were the parts of me that still surfaced despite everything, as literature has always had my heart. The five Fs were the rest of me, gone quiet, gone under.
I did my undergraduate degree at Benson Idahosa University, a Christian institution, and I want to be fair to it, because fairness is something I’ve had to learn. I did have support systems there. There were people who cared for me, structures that held me when I was falling. It would be dishonest to paint the place as a villain. But the environment and its values were, for who I was, simply too controlling. We were made to dress corporately to class, and corporately just to move around campus between eight in the morning and five in the evening. It sounds like a small thing, a dress code, but for a teenager already at war with a body she didn’t recognise, and a self she was still assembling, it was one more instruction to be someone other than herself. It sucked my soul out slowly. The scrutiny of young identity in Nigerian educational spaces is relentless; how you look, how you carry yourself, whether your very presentation reads as serious. And I was being scrutinised while I was still trying to figure out who was underneath all of it.
There were adults, too, who were free and careless with their words toward me, in ways I did not have the language to name then. And some mates simply did not understand me, and how could they, when I barely understood myself, arriving as I had years ahead of the developmental curve everyone else was riding together? I was in the room but never quite in the group. I have carried that out of university and into adulthood: a lingering sense that I do not do especially well in groups, that I am at my best a little apart.
That lingering sense is exactly what met me when the MIP admission came through. The programme, hosted at the School of Media and Communication at Pan-Atlantic University, would put me back inside a lecture hall, back among peers, back in the very configuration that had once nearly undone me. Of course, I was afraid.
But this is where the fifteen-year-old and I part ways. She was swallowed by her fear; she had not yet learned that fear is a limitation you place on yourself, and that the way through it is not criticism but grace. I have learned to sit with mine, to take it apart, see where it began in me, and then decide, deliberately, not to let it choose for me. So I said yes. Warily, bracing, but leaning into the quiet certainty that has carried me this far: if this opportunity had found me, it was because it was already mine to walk into. No fear. Just power, love, and a sound mind.
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Eager to learn, braced to share it
I have been trying to find the right words for what I felt in the week between receiving my acceptance and the first day of the programme, because it was anything but straightforward. Moreso, I do not like leaving my feelings unexamined. It was not doubt about the programme; I knew it would be good for me, and that I would come out sharper, better, and more equipped than I went in. The hesitation sat somewhere else entirely. When I finally found it, I was amused. My apprehension did not sit in belonging, or in my case, a lack thereof. I made my peace with belonging a long time ago, being my own person inside a group, always a little apart. What surfaced was narrower, and harder to argue myself out of. It was the prospect of having to work together. Of being bound, however, temporarily, to the rhythms, standards, and moods of other people, in a setting where my outcomes were no longer entirely mine to control.
Because I did want what the programme was offering — that was never in question. I have never been shy about my appetite for knowledge, and the curriculum promised exactly the kind of sharpening I am always hungry for. If it had been a solitary pursuit, just me and the material, I would have run toward it without a second thought. What gave me pause was everything around the learning: the group work, the shared deliverables, the delicate business of building something with people whose working styles I had not yet learned, and whose commitment I could not yet vouch for.
I think what I was really circling was a question about trust, and I know how much I demand of my own work. I know what I am willing to pour into a thing to make it good. What I did not know was how it would feel to hand a portion of that standard to strangers, to make my outcome partly theirs, and whether they would meet me where I hold myself. That is not a small thing to ask of yourself when you have spent years learning to rely, above all, on your own hands.
So that was the split I carried in with me: genuinely eager for what I would learn, and unsure how I would feel about the company I would have to keep while learning it.
The campus relieved me in unimaginable ways
The joy hit me the moment I got off the bus, and walked into the School of Media and Communication at the Pan-Atlantic University. It was a rainy day, grey and wet, and I had walked in wearing lime green suit pants and a zebra-striped blazer. I was dressed, in other words, entirely as myself, the way the old campus would have never permitted. And instead of feeling like a spectacle, I fit in. Everywhere around me, there were young people who actually looked like young people. Real Nigerian young people, not the sanded-down, uniformed approximations I had been shaped into at that age. Piercings. Sneakers. Fros. Coloured hair, bright and beautiful against the grey. Clusters of them huddled under cover from the rain, in their study groups, visibly excited about the work they were doing, wholly in their element and entirely themselves.
This was the exact thing I had longed for; the freedom to look like myself while I learn, to be a full and unedited person inside a serious place. And here it was, extended to a whole campus, as though it had never been in question at all. I passed a student giving another vocal training out by the Yemisi Shyllon Museum, the sound carrying across the wet air. Soon-to-be engineers moved through campus to the cafeteria in their overalls. Students with cameras slung across their backs, chasing anything they deemed worthy of documenting, despite the weather. Everywhere I looked, people were being allowed to be exactly what they were, out loud, and the place did not merely tolerate it; it seemed built for it.
The buildings themselves held the same spirit. I am hopelessly in love with brutalist architecture, and here it was, softened everywhere with plants and greenery, the severe and the living held in balance. In the rain, it was even better: the concrete darkened to something rich and deep, the greenery glossy and vivid against it. Brutalism on its own can read as punishment, all weight and no warmth. Brutalism with growth spilling over it reads as a promise. Standing there, damp and grinning in my zebra stripes, I understood that the architecture was of a piece with everything else I had been looking at; a place built to hold both structure and life, both discipline and self, without asking you to surrender one for the other.
My goal was to learn, not perform
Walking into MIP-5, I set myself a single rule: let the ego take the backburner. Be open. Be teachable. It sounds simple written down, but I want to be honest about what it asked of me, because for most of my life it would have been unthinkable. I have spent years being the one who speaks, the one the spotlight tends to find whether or not she reaches for it, and somewhere along the way I let that harden into an identity I felt I had to defend.
Then came the past year, which I spent in a kind of ego death. I will not pretend it was graceful. It was an ugly, necessary undoing, the sort that strips you of a self you thought you needed, and hands you back something truer in its place. What it cost me was the comfort of always being the brightest point in the room. What it gave me back was the ability to actually see the other people standing in it; to be curious about them instead of measuring myself against them. So when I made my little rule at the start of the programme, it was not false modesty. It was the practice of a lesson I had only just learned, and was still learning: that I lose nothing by letting other people be brilliant in front of me, and I gain a great deal.
Four months in, I am grateful I made that rule, because it let me see the cohort clearly. It is a room full of people whose brilliance is mine to be inspired by, just as mine is theirs to draw from. I finally understand that brilliance is not a fixed quantity to be won; it circulates, and I am better for standing in its current. There is Fisayo Fosudo, arguably West Africa’s most influential tech reviewer, and one of the kindest people I have ever come across; and David Eluemunoh, who is fascinating in the way he works. There is Veronica Dan-Ikpoyi, the award-winning broadcaster at TVC Communications, who turned out to be a little cheeky, and with whom I have shared more than a giggle or two. Ijeoma Thomas-Odia, Editor at Guardian Woman, the most ambitious person I know, running a PhD and this programme at the same time, and Chiamaka Dike of BBC Africa, my inquisitive friend, who was once Features Editor while I was Social Editor at Marie Claire Nigeria. How much we have both grown since then.
There is Justice Okamgba, an editor at Punch, Nigeria’s most widely read newspaper, as he never lets us forget. Segun Kasali of the Nigerian Tribune, to whom I deal chocolates — and I mean that literally; I keep a Dairy Milk in my bag, and no matter how far across the room he is seated, he will find his way to me to ask for it. There is Ifeduyi Oyesanmi, Managing Editor at TechCabal, who is deeply fascinated by my spiritual knowledge and has sat through more than one of my monologues on astrology. And there are Amarachukwu Ugwu and Emmanuel Onwuka, of Rhythm 93.7 and Nigeria Info FM respectively, the two most inquisitive people I have ever met. I hold Amarachukwu especially dear, because in my third month here I fell seriously ill, and she made sure I got the care I needed. Thank you, Amara.
All of them, truly unique characters. Every single one is someone I am learning from. And this is the part I did not see coming: when I set my ego down long enough to pay attention, the very interdependence I had braced against turned out to be the best thing in the room. I had walked in ready to be let down. Instead, I keep being met.
The curriculum stretched me in ways I welcomed
If the campus disarmed me and the cohort inspired me, it was the curriculum that did the deepest work. I came to MIP-5 hungry; I have never pretended otherwise. I expected to be fed. What I did not expect was where the learning would reach. I thought I was signing up to sharpen my craft. Instead, the programme kept reaching past my work and into the way I move through my own mind.
The reaching into my mind began with Dr. Chike Mgbeadichie’s Creativity and Innovation, a module I loved without reservation. We started somewhere more foundational than I anticipated: with thinking itself. I happen to adore thinking. Born a few centuries earlier, I suspect I would have been a philosopher rather than a magazine editor. But alas, in this capitalist cogwheel, one must get a real job. What served me most were the elements of thought, because when you lead a newsroom, your task is to tell a story with every relevant fact in place, and the framework gave me a clean way to break that down for my team. All thinking is contextual; without context, it becomes a philandering exercise. It has served me privately, too. When I catch myself overthinking now, I ask whose point of view is this: the woman I am, or the one I am moving away from and am still a little afraid to release? That is the module still living in me.
Then there was the reaching into my image of myself, which came, of all places, from Dr. Ikechukwu Obiaya’s philosophy of fashion and branding. Its guiding question, what do you want to be known for, and why does it matter?, has sat with me since, because it pressed on a negotiation I have carried my whole life. As a woman, I have always wanted to be, at once, the most beautiful person in the room and one of the sharpest, in a society that has generally insisted I pick one. The class made me ask whether I wield my appearance as a tool to make my intelligence land as a pleasant surprise, or whether I cared for the way I looked with the same sincerity that I cared for the way I thought. I arrived at something honest: I am still, unapologetically, building a personal style that leans into the sensual, feminine version of myself, because she is my favourite version of myself, and I refuse the premise that she and my intellect compete. I want the younger women watching to know they need not amputate the one to be taken seriously in the other.
Two sessions, in particular, reached into my sense of duty: Mrs. Obianuju Otudor’s class on Intellectual Property, and Dr. Añuli Agina’s Culture, Society and the Media. With intellectual property, learning the distinction between authorship and ownership reframed how I hold my own work, so that I now understand how I navigate creating columns for Marie Claire Nigeria. I left with a stricter crediting policy than the one I came in with, because I now grasp, in concrete terms, how much can go wrong when authorship and ownership are treated carelessly. With Culture, Society and the Media, the importance of the media’s role in transmitting culture, in representation, in deciding whose story is told and how was further grounded. Between the two classes sits the whole of my stewardship: what I am careful to own, and what I am careful to honour.
None of this happened by accident, and I would be remiss not to say so. What the School of Media and Communication has assembled is a treasure trove of facilitators, and I have felt the weight of my good fortune in every session. There was Dr. Ruth Oji, whose Advanced Language Skills was perhaps my favourite hours of all. It reached straight back into my undergraduate love of English and reminding me why the right word, precisely placed, is its own kind of power. There was Mr. Tayo Fagbule, whose class on innovation was so alive and interactive that I left it thinking differently about how a legacy institution learns to move. Yahaya Ibrahim, Lynda Saint-Nwafor, Chukwuebuka Ezewuzie, Dr. Lakinbofa Goodluck, Dr. Busola Tejumola, Prof. Olusegun Vincent, and many more. Each arrived with a generosity that struck me every time: brilliant, accomplished people handing over their treasure trove of knowledge to eager minds.
The woman I needed
Of all the things this programme returned to me, the one I hold closest is not a skill or a contact or a line for my résumé. It is a recognition: that I have become the woman my younger selves were waiting for.
I know what it cost to become her, which is why I do not say it lightly. The girl who failed that semester at fifteen did not need discipline or a stern talking-to; she needed someone to sit beside her without flinching, to be tired with her and believe in her anyway. I am that someone now, for her and for myself. The fourteen-year-old who was dressed into a uniform and scrutinised into silence needed proof that a person could be brilliant and beautiful and strange all at once and lose nothing for it. I did not have that proof then. I have since become it. And there is a particular tenderness that moves through me when I let this land: that the adult the child kept waiting for, the one who was meant to arrive and make it all make sense, turned out to be me. I came. I keep coming. That is what I am proudest of. Prouder than the title, prouder than the bylines, prouder than any room I have been the youngest to lead. Not that I survived her, but that I grew into someone she would have been so relieved to find.
And walking the grounds of Pan-Atlantic University, watching those kids with their coloured hair and their cameras and their unbothered, un-scrutinised joy, I felt that tenderness extend outward into something like relief. Because it means the environment exists. The education and the support that I so badly needed in my own undergrad, and that I had begun to believe was simply not available in a Nigerian institution. It is real. It is here. PAU exists, and I am so glad it does. Not only for me, but for every early-admitted, half-formed, too-bright teenager who will walk in years ahead of her peers and, for once, be met exactly where she is.
I survived my education. That is the plain truth of my first university. But the girl who nearly disappeared into a failed semester deserved more than survival. She deserved a place that would let her be entirely herself while it made her better. I am glad, more than I can neatly say, that such a place turned out to exist. I only wish I could go back and tell her: hold on. You become the woman you’re waiting for. And the room you needed — it’s out there. It is concrete and green and full of young people who look just like you did, finally allowed.
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