Nigerian Teenager accepted to 15 schools on scholarships worth $2M

Rotimi Kukoyi, a Nigerian teenager from Alabama, has been accepted to over fifteen institutions, including Harvard and Johns Hopkins, receiving over $2 million in scholarship offers.

The universities that accepted Kukoyi include Harvard, Stanford, Yale, 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.

Kukoyi, is his school's first Black National Merit Scholar. He told ABC News that after competing on the "Jeopardy!" Teen Tournament as a junior in 2018 and encountering highly-intellectual students from across the country, he was encouraged to apply to a variety of institutions.

"It was really fun experience but also put me in contact with some pretty cool students from across the country," Kukoyi said. "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."

Kukoyi also mentioned that as the only Black male student at his high school, he aspires to make a difference so that marginalized groups and lower-income students have equal access to educational opportunities as their counterparts.

Kukoyi and his fellow National Merit finalists put up free tutoring for anyone who needed extra academic help or resources, as well as those preparing for the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test.

"... I feel like a lot of the disparities that we see with standardized testing are because these underrepresented minorities in low-income communities often can't afford the same levels of [test preparation] that that their wealthier counterparts get," he said. "So by establishing free tutoring programs, that could kind of help to equalize the playing field."

The whiz kid has chosen to study at UNC Chapel Hill, accepting the Morehead-Cain Scholarship, the country's oldest merit scholarship. He intends to study public health while at UNC in order to help others. He stated the pandemic and his experience with the Alabama Department of Health in getting people vaccinated influenced his decision.

"COVID really sparked [my interest in public health] because that was the first time that I really saw how clear the health inequities were," Kukoyi told ABC news. "African Americans had a much higher chance of dying from COVID than white Americans ... it was almost like there were two separate pandemics impacting our nation, and we saw [some people] marginalized and impacted way more."

The youngster is a soccer star in school and is the son of immigrants in America. He went on to say that he hopes his accomplishment will encourage others who are pursuing their own dreams.