I’m an incoming law undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, and I was born and raised in Newham. I am also half Igbo and half Yoruba, two of the largest tribes in Nigeria. I have never hidden from the fact that I’m a Nigerian, and frequent trips back home to my motherland have helped to reinforce my black identity and provided me with the desire to help the Nigerian and Afro-Caribbean diaspora that settle here in the UK.

A variety of factors have driven me to succeed, and continue to drive me today, from wanting to repay the investment that my parents had made in me by moving to London (from Nigeria) in 1999, to wanting to improve my life chances. However, one of my most important factors is the desire to be different.

I do understand that this is more easily said than done: we are all influenced by the environment (meaning our communities, friends, family and media) in one way or another.

But when the environment that you have been brought up in threatens to limit your ability to grow and become successful by any means (regardless of what you deem to be success), then it is imperative that you seize control and use your differences to achieve the end result that YOU want, not necessarily the end result that stereotypes dictate.

I remember a statistic from one of my AS Sociology lessons about Black Britons being nine times more likely to be jailed than their white counterparts.

I had just started thinking about university and the possibility of applying to Oxbridge, and was pondering on the fact that I, as a young black male from London, was more likely to end up on the wrong side of the law than in a university like Cambridge studying the law.

This made me more determined than ever to take a different path in life and steer clear from the dark underbelly of England’s capital in order to secure a stable, fulfilling and rewarding future for myself and my family.

In my instance, applying to study law meant that I had to spend significantly more time indoors and locked up in my bedroom revising for multiple entry examinations (such as the Cambridge Law Test and Law National Aptitude Test (LNAT)) over the past 18 months, despite others around me soaking in their first bit of clubbing and eating out that they had had in over a year, given the initial lifting of the COVID-19 restrictions in the summer and autumn of 2020.

Through this, I had forged my own path that was different from the others and learnt about the art of sacrifice: in sacrificing much of my social life, I had been graced with university offers and high aptitude scores.

The University of Cambridge welcomed a record 137 UK-based Black undergraduate students as part of their 2020 intake. It is projected that the figure will rise this year.In addition the Russell Group of high profile research universities currently have less than approximately 4 per cent of their undergraduates as Black Britons, as of July 2021.

Of all apprenticeship starts in 2019/20, some 13.3 per cent were black or thenic minority according to the Department of Education. These figures are evidence of a new wave of young and black individuals who aspire to break down stereotypes, but they are still not reflective of the vast amount of potential that exists within these diverse communities.

Young people can be part of the change that shatters diversity and inclusion statistics in the top firms, companies, and universities. Not everybody aspires to go to university, enter the music industry or become a professional footballer, and that is perfectly fine, but there is a new wave of change with people who use their talents to dismantle the racial constraints that plague ethnic communities today. The question is: what can other black or ethnic minority youngsters or others take from this? We are all products of our environment, but we don’t have to become victims of it.

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