Nigerian University Students who struggle with difficult lecturers, demanding courses or the pressure of managing personal responsibilities alongside academics may find some useful perspective in the career of a UNILAG professor who navigated all three simultaneously and came out with a clean academic record.
Professor Ayoka Mopelola Olusakin, former Director of Academic Planning and Pioneer Director of the Safeguarding Centre at the University of Lagos, spent her undergraduate years at the University of Ibadan, married, raising a child and taking some of the most demanding courses on offer. She graduated in 1982 with a Second Class Upper and no carry overs.
The lesson she draws from that period is not about personal strength. It is about preparation and honesty with oneself. Students who engage seriously with difficult material, she argues, tend to discover that the difficulty is manageable. Those who avoid it tend to confirm their own fears. She points to her experience in Professor Niyi Osundare's class, widely feared across the UI campus at the time, where deliberate engagement produced a score of 79%.
On course choice, her position is equally direct. She chose Guidance and Counselling at a time when most students and parents considered it a lesser option compared to law, medicine or engineering. She reasoned that a course aligned with genuine interest produces better outcomes than one chosen for its reputation. Decades later, that decision shaped a career that included founding a safeguarding centre, directing academic planning and receiving UNILAG's Gold Medal Award.
The broader point she makes for current students is that the Nigerian university environment, for all its challenges, does not prevent serious academic work. What it does is make the gap between prepared and unprepared students particularly visible.
