A 17-year-old Nigerian girl named Victory Yinks-Banjo has won the top position in World English Cambridge Examination and earned a 5 million dollars scholarship for admission to 19 universities in the US and Canada.
Victory-Yinka Banjo is a high school graduate of Princeton High School, Lagos in Nigeria. She received full-ride scholarship offers from 19 prestigious universities in the United States and Canada.
The scholarships she was awarded were worth over 5 million dollars in total. Victory earned acceptance from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Virginia, and Ivy League schools like Yale College, Harvard College, Princeton University, and Brown University all on full-ride scholarships.
She also won full scholarships at some top Canadian universities. Victory was awarded the Lester B. Pearson scholarship from the University of Toronto and the Karen McKellin International Leader of Tomorrow (KMILOT) scholarship from the University of British Columbia.
“It still feels pretty unbelievable. I applied to so many schools because I didn’t even think any school would accept me,” Victory said.
“Their admissions processes are extremely selective. They only accept the best of the best. So, you can imagine how, on a daily basis, I have to remind myself that I actually got into these schools. It is surreal,” she added.
Victory has been outstanding since high school where she also became a senior prefect. She scored straight A’s in her West African Senior School Certificate Examination and was also awarded the overall best in World Cambridge Exam for her performance in English as a second language.
She was also the President of the Student Representative Council, founder of the coding club, secretary of the Student Representative Council, and the lead violinist for the school’s orchestra.
Victory said in an interview with CNN that she attributed her achievements to her parents who guided her, as well as her faith and hard work. She added that all the scholarship offers really made her proud of herself.
Victory is currently studying Molecular Biology and Computer Science (Computational Biology)at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States.
