Baba Adejuyigbe

I left SA for Cornell University in 2014, yearning for educational opportunities that were absent at home. More so, I was inspired to learn the tools necessary to address the issues of inequity that I had seen and experienced at home. I arrived at Cornell, eager to explore some of these concepts and satiate my desire to learn and innovate. I fully expected to hit the ground running. After-all, it had been that way in high school. My mother stressed the importance of education growing up, often touting it as one of the strongest factors that would help us alleviate our circumstances. I internalized this message and committed to excelling in school. I had always been a straight-A student. I finished high school within the top 5 academic performers in my entire class.  However, things were different at Cornell. Between moving countries and starting a new chapter in life, I felt extremely lost in the beginning of college. My grades reflected my lack of solid bearings and by the end of my sophomore year, I could feel my dreams of becoming a physician slipping through my fingers as my transcript became less and less decorated with A’s. 

However, even despite my many ‘failings’ in the beginning, I never lost sight of the end-goal of becoming a physician. In tough times, the soft embers of my family’s encouragement and the desperate need for change at home kept my flame alive. I focused on the bright spots – There are always bright spots. Where were the areas in my life/academics where I was doing well? How could I replicate these areas and apply them to other parts of my life? I figured out that college was more about learning how to learn, than learning what to learn. As I altered my study habits, and became more willing to ask for help, everything shifted. Eventually, my grades began to reflect my efforts and perseverance.

Outside of my studies, I still had this burning desire to innovate – which seemed to grow as I became more entrenched in my studies. As I learned about the inner workings of health inequity and population health, my sense of compassion seemed to expand beyond people at home and my brother, growing to include anyone who was suffering from health inequity. My academic pursuits and research helped me discover my passion for scientific inquiry and knowledge for the betterment of human health. Classes dealing with complex ethical health topics or that explored the biological and environmental factors affecting human health excited me most. I joined the Erickson Lab during my sophomore year in college as the lab’s only undergraduate student within a lab of mechanical engineering PhD candidates. We designed and developed point-of-care, medical diagnostic devices for limited-resource settings. I worked most closely on the development of lateral flow assays to rapidly test for micronutrient concentrations such as vitamins D, E and Ferritin using smartphone technology. The intellectual obstacles I encountered while optimizing durability, accuracy and stability of our tests helped me develop a deeper sense of regard for medicine.