WITH LOVE, ANAYA II

17th March, 2021

Monday

9 pm

Dear Diary,

So I know it’s been a little over a year since I wrote an entry, but you’ll have to cut me some slack. In between balancing classes, writing my project, dealing with extracurricular activities, leaving school due to a global pandemic, figuring out the “new normal”, graduating from university, and starting an entry-level job, I haven’t been in the right headspace to sit down, and share updates. Where do I start?

In the first week of March 2020, our fairytale future blew up in our faces. COVID-19, a contagious virus with a high death rate, no way to detect in the early stages of infection, and no known cure, was in Nigeria, so we were forced to leave school until further notice. Go figure. 

This phase should have lasted about a month or two, abi? Wrong. It lasted about ten months, and during the first three months, I got busy with banana bread, TikTok, and staying in touch with my friends.

Kam, on the other hand, had enrolled in Yale University’s Financial Markets Coursera course and was making significant progress. Go, girl!

Blessing started learning UI/UX design on Udemy, and in true genius fashion, by April 2020, she was already designing beautiful websites for her portfolio.

We still had classes and assessments to complete when we left school, so our lecturers reached out to us with lesson notes, assignments, and occasionally video lectures so we could keep up with our learning despite a global pandemic, but because we had completed the bulk of our work in school, the “school from home” did not require much time or effort. 

Our school announced that we would be writing exams online via our school portal around June 2020, following the lockdown. My friends and I studied for our exams, collaborated on projects with our supervisors via Gmail, and graduated via Zoom in August 2020. I missed my friends, especially on our special day, but my joy in our unconventional graduation is that I graduated with a 4.48 out of 5 GPA, proving that all of my hard work was not in vain!

About two months after graduation, Kam was hired as an ad hoc staff member with Moneywise, one of the highest-rated multi-national asset management investment companies in Nigeria in its Ikoyi headquarters. To facilitate her move, her parents rented her a three-bedroom apartment in Parkview Estate and gave her a car. It’s no surprise. In between her drive, and her “connections”, she was not going to work in a nameless company. 

To our surprise, Blessing decided to pursue UI/UX full-time as a freelancer, and by November 2020, just a few months into freelancing, she received an offer from Drive, one of Nigeria’s big four tech companies, to work as a remote junior designer. 

I, on the other hand, decided to take the chill route. Within four months of my graduation, I decided to explore fun hobbies like video editing while applying for entry-level economics analyst positions. I eventually landed a remote internship as a Research Assistant in January 2021 with a mid-sized company called “Scale” in Ikeja, Lagos, and while I was naturally excited about the opportunity, no one else was. 

My family was sceptical because Scale had a limited web presence, so there wasn’t much to vet it by, Kam was not very excited by the opportunity (but pretended to be excited and failed) because the role I had gotten was too low down the corporate ladder with an uncertified growth progression, and Blessing wasn’t very excited either because the business didn’t appear to make a lot of revenue, but did I care? No. This was a small beginning that I was proud of.