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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.—Shalom Ejiwunmi is well-versed on a variety of topics—but women’s health is the one that really gets her talking.
“We’re special; and we deserve to be treated special,” the 21-year-old exclaimed enthusiastically.
Ejiwunmi believes that women’s health issues, too often, are glossed over by the medical profession and society in general. In particular, she wants to someday bring greater focus to menopause and how it impacts health outcomes for women in their later years.
As a semifinalist for the Cooke scholarship, the Perimeter College student is a step closer to making this happen.
She’s also nearly six thousand miles away from her native Nigeria where she grew up under the loving care of her grandparents and an aunt after her mom moved to the United States.
Ejiwunmi graduated from high school at age 16 in Lagos and applied to medical school shortly after. She received a rejection letter, then tried again a year later with the same response.
“I felt like my whole life was a lie, like I wasn’t smart enough and I couldn’t do it,” she recalled of that time.
Ejiwunmi then turned her attention to doing hair and baking cakes.
“I wasn’t good at it,” she said, with widened eyes and laughter, of her baking experience.
“My cakes were always hard.”
In 2021, Ejiwunmi ceded her mom’s encouragement to join her in Atlanta. But by then, she wasn’t sure she wanted to attend college. To earn money, she became a makeup artist, braided hair and styled Gele, a traditional Nigerian head dress, for women attending weddings.
“At some point I just stopped feeling fulfilled,” she said, while adding that it was those diverse interactions with women that contributed to her desire to work in women’s health.
Eventually, Ejiwunmi’s mother convinced her to enroll at Perimeter College where she now studies biology. Her mom is also a Perimeter student taking prerequisites for the nursing program.
“She’s always pushing me to do better and to want better things for my life,” Ejiwunmi said of her mom.
At Perimeter, Ejiwunmi is making her mother and others proud.
She recently learned that she and a team of Perimeter students will travel to Washington, D.C. this summer to participate as finalists in the Community College Innovation Challenge.
“We’re designing a product to reduce the invasiveness of the Pap smear to encourage more people, particularly first-time testers, trans men and sexual assault survivors, to get screened for cervical cancer,” she said.
Winning the competition would give Ejiwunmi and the team, led by Perimeter professor Dr. Janna Blum, a chance to refine their idea and possibly bring it to market.
In April, Ejiwunmi received Perimeter’s Student Academic Recognition (STAR) Award for outstanding biology student.
In addition to her scholarly work with various STEM-related organizations at the college, Ejiwunmi works almost full-time at a fast food restaurant, continues to make connections with women through her beauty services and volunteers through Hands on Atlanta and Tree Atlanta.
After graduating from Perimeter College this summer, Ejiwunmi plans to study biomedical engineering at either Georgia Tech, Brown University or Cornell University.
Wherever her path leads, Ejiwunmi is certain of one thing.
“My niche and where I want to make my name is in women’s health…there’s so much that needs to be known, holes that need to be filled,” she said.
The Cooke Foundation will announce its 2024 winners later this spring.
Story by Kysa Anderson Daniels
Photo by Bill Roa