by Frank Oppong
No one points to his father’s home with his left hand, a popular adage among the Akans in Ghana. This saying should not be taken literally. The simplest meaning I can give is that everyone cherishes their roots and the culture that they were born to. I am a proud product of the University of Cape Coast also known as University of Competitive Choice.
My love for knowledge kept growing every second went by with time in the classroom. I had a perfect plan while in school. Per my plan, I would do a year bachelors, do my national service, get a job and start my own family. Straightforward and easy plan to follow. But this did not happen as I planned. After school I landed a marketing job in pensions, and I accelerated through the ranks and finally ended as a Branch Manager. I can boast of over 6 years’ experience in the field of sales and marketing as well as managing colleagues in the corporate world to achieve set goals. It was laborious initially, but I sailed through. I must admit that my background in psychology was helpful. I understood and accommodated all behaviors with professionalism which I developed with the passage of time.
Going back to school
Tuition in most public schools in Ghana is free. But the only charges paid are for maintenance and operational cost. This is so to make education free and accessible to all regardless of level, In fact, the first president of Ghana, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah introduced this through the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE) after gaining independence for Ghana. This aligns with the United Nations Goal on making education free and accessible to all. After several years in the corporate world, I finally decided to pursue further education. Like other parts of the world, my decision to work after my undergraduate studies was to gather money to further my education. Work-study options in Ghana are so rare and, interestingly, it is something not common at all. I sometimes wonder why work-study opportunities are not available for students. But how can this be possible in a country where graduates find it difficult to land a job after school: where unemployment rates are so high? Therefore, the decision to advance academically was not only to pursue knowledge but I saw it to be the sure way to have a competitive advantage, as an advanced degree in my field opens a lot of job opportunities that cannot be accessed with a first degree. In Ghana, the minimum qualification needed to be a professor is a doctoral degree. This was a step in that direction.
After putting together, a strong application for a place in a master’s program at the University of Cape Coast, my alma mater, I got accepted in 2019 to read Measurement and Evaluation. I loved the program due to its research and statistics focus. I also learned so much about program evaluation as well as promoting diversity and inclusion when dealing with individuals of varied abilities when I started the program with my cohort in August 2019. Sincerely, I did enjoy every class I attended. Graduate school felt so different from my undergraduate experience. One notable thing I always share is the relationship with professors. Most undergraduate classes are large, making it difficult to have meaningful relationships with professors, let alone learn from their mentorship. But our training was rigorous. As future leaders in the field of education and research, we were mostly trained to engage in projects and allowed to do presentations to harness our skills. Discourse in class was scholarly which challenged us to think critically and provide submissions that were practical and professional. The healthy collaboration and competition among my cohorts facilitated our earlier completion and subsequent graduation.
Applying to Study Abroad
I started my journey to study abroad as far back as 2016. Then why did I enter the US in 2022? I must say the road to study abroad was/is not easy for brilliant students like me from third-world countries. My target, initially, was to study in Europe. I gained admission to top universities in Italy, United Kingdom, Norway, Finland, Turkey, Russia and Canada. These admissions came with either partial or no scholarships. The closest I came to achieving my dream was in 2018 but I was denied a visa to study in Universitas di Siena in Italy. The most frustrating of all was my admission to Abo Akademie in Finland and NTNU in Norway. All I needed to show was proof of living expenses as, during that period, tuition was free. With my financial background, it was difficult to raise 80,000 Ghana cedis ($17,674 in 2018) to a blocked account per the visa procedure.
These experiences taught me one lesson: that with my sterling academic grades, securing admissions to my program of my interest was not the problem. My GPA was competitive enough to gain me admission in most universities. This is no surprise as the education systems in most African countries are mostly modeled after the western education system. A country like Ghana has its education system modeled after the UK school system. It can be traced back to the colonial days where the British colonial masters introduced an education system to train the indigenous people to have personnel who have similar training and education as those exposed in Britain. That is how I came to speak English fluently and that afforded me a place to learn with other scholars from all around the world.
Visa process
The most challenging hurdle to overcome after gaining admission is securing your visa. The excitement and joy that comes with a notification of admission to a university is quickly subdued by the many processes and documents one needs to provide. After my admission to Ohio University to pursue a PhD, I needed to provide a financial statement as proof of funds to support my education. This financial statement is a big hurdle for scholars from third-world countries with not so good socio-economic backgrounds. I was fortunate. I had my family members to support me in meeting this requirement thereby securing my i-20 for onward visa application. I paid my visa application fee and here was everyone’s pain, “getting an interview date”. After the Covid pandemic, the American embassy in Ghana, and other African countries, recorded so many backlogs of student visa applications. This meant that there were a lot of applicants scrambling for the few time slots for interviews. It was extremely difficult to get a date. An available date could be 2024 or 2025 even though we were in the year 2022 and the program was supposed to start August the same year. Those who had extra money decided to visit neighboring countries that had available interview dates. I have friends that got their visas in Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Gambia and now South Africa. They had to travel by road in buses for days.
In the grand scheme of things, after admissions, all one needs is the visa. But this is not so from our part of the world. This experience was so hard to explain and be understood by school officials and anyone from first world countries who easily access a visa and can travel to any country of their choice without any hassle. As if the struggle for a date was not enough, then came the tension and anxiety as on each interview day, hundreds of students accepted to various universities in the USA must prove beyond doubt that they merit the visa to study in the US.
In my case, I was lucky. In fact, I am one of few cases where the embassy schedules an applicant for an interview. To this day, I still do not know what I did differently to merit such favor from God and the embassy. On that fateful day of the interview, June 22, 2022, I arrived at the embassy as early as 7am because my interview time was 8:30 am. I was fortunate to be part of a set of applicants who were not more than 25. We waited under the famous tree area and were called in by the security officers. When eventually it got to my turn, I knew that I needed to give it my all. Not everyone gets this opportunity to get this far. Going through the interview successfully would help me achieve my educational aspirations and career goal of becoming a professor in a tertiary institution in my field. I answered all the questions I was asked confidently and though I only had a partial scholarship, my visa was granted. I finally moved to the US on July 13th, 2022. I reflect today with a sigh of relief knowing that my future is in my own hands and the opportunities that await me are endless.
Join me in my next article as I delve into my plans after school as an international student.
To be continued…
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