A teenager from Alabama has been accepted into 15 prestigious US universities – including Yale and Harvard – and awarded $2,000,000 (£1,635,924.00) in scholarships.
High school senior Rotimi Kukoyi was inspired to apply to numerous universities after meeting fellow high achieving students when he took part in the Jeopardy! Teen Tournament back in 2018.
Aside from being offered millions in scholarships, Kukoyi was also accepted into Stanford, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, Vanderbilt, Emory, Rice, Johns Hopkins, Duke, the University of Alabama, Case Western Reserve University, UAB, Auburn University and Washington University in St. Louis.
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Kukoyi has decided he wants to go to UNC Chapel Hill where he accepted a place on the Morehead-Cain Scholarship.
The Morehead-Cain Scholarship is billed as being ‘a four-year, fully funded educational experience for exceptional student leaders’ and is the oldest scholarship of its kind in America.
Kukoyi is the first Black National Merit Scholar at his school and opened up about his inspiring Jeopardy! appearance when speaking to ABC News.
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He explained: "It was [a] really fun experience but also put me in contact with some pretty cool students from across the country.”
Kukoyi added: “A lot of them are older and they're like seniors or juniors that applied to many prestigious schools. A lot of them are attending prestigious universities now. So that was kind of my original inspiration to apply to those universities."
The star student wants to pursue a career in public health, a decision he reached during the pandemic.
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Kukoyi helped the Alabama Department of Health get residents vaccinated after winning a TikTok competition.
Aimed at young people aged between 13 and 29, the Alabama health department sponsored the social media contest in a bid to encourage more residents to get vaccinated, something Kukoyi was more than happy to help out with.
Kukoyi told ABC the state was experiencing low vaccine uptake and he wanted to help change that.
He told his TikTok followers: “So why did I get the vaccine? This is my why. COVID deaths shouldn't be normalised. The vaccines are safe and effective."
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Explaining how the experience helped shape his career aspirations, Kukoyi said: “COVID really sparked [my interest in public health] because that was the first time that I really saw how clear the health inequities were.”
"African Americans had a much higher chance of dying from COVID than white Americans,” he added.
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Aisha Nozari