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Eight students from Georgia State University’s Perimeter College have been named semifinalists for the 2024 Jack Kent Cooke Undergraduate Transfer Scholarship. The Jack Kent Cooke award is a competitive scholarship for the nation’s top two-year college students. It provides recipients with up to $55,000 per year, placing the scholarship among the largest private awards in the country for community college transfer students. The semifinalists, all Perimeter Honors College students working toward their associate degrees, are among 459 individuals selected from more than 1,600 applicants attending 194 community colleges in 37 states, plus Washington, DC, and the Northern Mariana Islands The following is one of the student profiles.
CLARKSTON, Ga.—Prevail Olusegun-Joseph is charting his own path to medical success by ditching the conventional route to becoming a doctor. A 19-year-old Health Sciences Professions student at Perimeter College, Olusegun-Joseph is opting to first practice as a nurse.
“Originally, I always wanted to be a doctor and surgeon,” he said.
“But nurses are actually right in the mix with the patients. So, I felt like nursing would give me the experience to, down the line, provide exceptional primary patient care as a doctor.”
As a 2024 semifinalist for the Jack Kent Cooke Undergraduate Transfer Scholarship and with healthcare experience under his belt already, Olusegun-Joseph is on track for fulfilling his dream.
He grew up in Lagos, the capitol city of Nigeria, where—as a teenager—he served on a church-led medical outreach team that provided care to local communities and also partnered at a hospital founded and managed by his father, a cardiologist.
It was at his dad’s Amazing Heart Center hospital that Olusegun-Joseph initially felt the push to study nursing. Soft-spoken, with a deliberate tone, he recalled witnessing the work ethic of one particular nurse.
“There was something about nurse Huesu,” he said.
“She was always so joyful, and I was like ‘I really want to be something like that; as a nurse you have to be positive to give hope to others.’”
Olusegun-Joseph finds inspiration in his dad as well. He fondly reflected on the time patients showed up at a birthday celebration to honor his father and spoke highly of him.
“They were saying things like ‘He’s the calmest doctor; he’s always there to listen,” he remembered.
“’They said how he was always there to give them hope that things were going to be alright, and I said, ‘I need to be like him.’”
As a Perimeter student, Olusegun-Joseph is building his own reputation—as an affable go-getter serving in the Perimeter Ambassador leadership program and as an International Student Peer Advisor. He credits International Student & Scholar Services advisor Deborah Livingston with helping him succeed as a Perimeter student.
Olusegun-Joseph also has experience as a Supplemental Instructor helping students to excel in college algebra.
When things get tough for him, Olusegun-Joseph recalls what his mom told him during an especially stressful time in his college academic journey.
She said: “It’s not how fast, it’s how well.”
This saying stuck for Olusegun-Joseph, and he uses it as a mantra for moving toward his dream of, first, becoming a nurse, then, a doctor—perhaps a cardiologist like his dad.
For now, his focus is on graduating from Perimeter this summer and pursuing his nursing degree while studying health informatics at either Georgia State’s Atlanta Campus, Emory University, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities or Mercer University.
“I’ll get there,” he said of his ultimate goal. “I just have to do what I’m doing now the best that I can.”
The Cooke Foundation will announce its 2024 winners later this spring.
Story by Kysa Anderson Daniels
Photo by Bill Roa