No Matter What Life Brings: Olakunle Awoyele’s Story

Life may seem tough at first, and we often blame institutions and people for the struggles that we face in life. That was my story until I decided to take my future into my own hands.

In secondary school, I switched from science class to arts because I was told that I had a talent for drama. At that point, I was certain that I was to become a lawyer because it was the field most people believed was respectable in the arts. However, upon gaining admission into the university, I was offered philosophy — my first shift in destiny.

Encouraged that “the course you study does not matter,” I studied hard, and to make money, I occasionally sold provisions like beverages, sachet water, biscuits, etc., to students in my hostel. After university, I realized that life did not work the way people described it. I moved across states in search of different jobs. At a point, I became idle and found an interest in forex, to which I eventually lost a substantial amount of money.

At this down point in my life, my friend, Tosin, who was a member of the eighth cohort of the Semicolon program, introduced me to Semicolon. Not convinced that tech was for me yet, I waited. I became certain that I should explore tech when I discovered that my friend, who went through the program, got a job immediately after his one-year training. Nothing else needed to be said. I joined the next available cohort.

I will never forget my experience on our onboarding day. It was warm and welcoming, and I felt comfortable. Initially, I had a misconception about Java and JavaScript. The only Java I knew was the one I saw when I played games on Java phones. When programming classes started, I remember questioning myself and asking myself if I had made the right choice. I struggled for a while, and initially, I would pick up a programming book and try to cram my way through like I did at the university. This only made life worse for me. It was not until the second and third chapters of Java that I understood what I was doing.

I was always vocal, and I also brought a bit of my entrepreneurial ability when I started a POS business while at Semicolon, and I was nicknamed “Prof” after I represented my cohort in a quiz and debate competition. One defining moment that I had within the program was my struggle with an assignment on arrays. It was during the December holiday, and all attempts people made to teach me offline failed. The fact that my cohort-mates could do it made me doubt myself. Eventually, I sat down on a particular day and refused to get up until I got it. That day, it finally made sense.

I knew I was getting better as months passed in the program. People came to me with problems, and I could help them, and that became my most cherished part of the program, knowing that I contributed to the growth of others. I received both a challenge and a change of fortune in my eighth month in the program. I got my first tech job. It was something I looked forward to, but it was also scary because I had not completed some key courses, so I had to double up my efforts.

Combining learning new technologies at work and building a separate project during my capstone project phase was another difficulty I encountered. I had to find a balance between building Stelline, my capstone project at Semicolon, which was the platform we created that offered the services of nannies and caregivers to parents who were working, and the loads of tasks that I had to manage in my new job.

Life may have offered me only idleness, but I learned to take control, and now I am proud of who I’ve become and who I am to become in the tech space. The foundation has been laid, and a forward thinker can only move forward.