How This University Turns Its Graduates Into Leaders

"Tell a child a story long enough, and they just might end up believing it."

I wonder if this was what went through the mind of the Chancellor of Covenant University when he created the Towards a Total Graduate program, otherwise known as TTG.

I'd often heard it being said by various lecturers at the university that people often wondered what made Covenant University students so different from other graduates. I, being the rational skeptic that I am, doubted this for various reasons.

One, I had learned not to believe a man that sings his praise, for it could mean he is too loud to hear the words of others (there should be an African proverb about this somewhere, there always is).

Two, I went to what some consider one of the best secondary schools in my state and was privileged to know some students in my set at better secondary schools in the state (some I knew directly, others I knew through stories).

As far as I knew, not up to 40% of the best students in those best secondary schools came to Covenant. I know this because I came here, and I knew for a fact that while I am intelligent, I was still not among the top best (let us all remember that I am judging intelligence based on a mixture of academics and extracurricular activities).

Third, having spent four years in the university, gone through a variety of issues (I once nearly got suspended for wearing a supposedly short skirt), and seen many drops out of school; I could not fathom how any mentally stable person could be produced from this university, much less a person stable enough to create any meaningful impact.

Fourth, as I am quite not ashamed to say, I hardly ever went out. If I was not at home with my family, I was outside at an office looking for work experience, or I was at home with my family and working. This, of course, I doubted was a result of my orientation from my alma mater.

I was vehemently opposed to the idea that Covenant University shaped me into the woman who loves work as much as I do today (and I am still opposed to it despite what rational facts say otherwise).

Still, I didn't go out enough or interact with my schoolmates enough outside school to know whether what they said was true or not. Frankly, I could have cared less (I was still very much angry about the whole skirt scenario).

Then came my final year – a year I honestly did not believe I would see (at Covenant, many enter, but few leave. You can take that as morbidly as you see fit). And after the hustle and bustle of figuring out what exactly an undergraduate dissertation meant, we were told that there was just one more round of training before we would be allowed to finally call ourselves eagles (yes, you read that right. We're eagles now).

That final round was Towards a Total Graduate, or as many of us fondly call it, Towards The Gate. This program, TTG, was specially designed by our Chancellor. It also had no units and no certificates, yet every graduating student is expected to make 100% attendance to call themselves a graduate. And they weren't joking. People were coming back because of it.

So you can imagine how not-so-thrilled we were to have to do it. We had faced numerous challenges from battling the pandemic to battling the school system (just your average university life I suppose), but somehow, this seemed to be our hardest battle yet. Hard mostly because of the stories we had heard from our predecessors. Stories we would come to realize might not have been as true as they seemed.

The first day seemed to have all the promises of boredom we had been told. Mostly because our sessions began in the morning (and no one is ever fully awake by 8 am) but it wasn't long into the program when things started changing.

I cannot recall when the change first began for everyone (assuming everyone was awake to see it happen), but for me, it began during the night sessions - when one speaker came to talk to us about the World Of Work (or WOW as he so playfully calls it).

He began the class with a small fact: in 2019, Apple had 3.3 million job applicants with a 0.2% acceptance rate, meaning it was harder to work at Apple than to enter Harvard (take a moment to let that blow your mind and deflate your ego as it did mine).

I turned around to look at people's faces, and I could tell that quite a few were probably thinking twice about sending those applications (and I don't blame, I'd be thinking twice too). But then we went on and the speaker aid (paraphrased, of course. You don't really expect me to remember every word now, do you?), "this is why we created this program. To teach you to be among the 0.2%".

Remember what I said in the very beginning? Well, this was when the ripple effects started. In his session, he carefully introduced us to the dos and donts of CV and life as an entry-level employee.

Somehow, by the end of the class, people seemed more excited and eager to apply for jobs than they did initially. Of course, at this point, I was convinced there was some sort of madness going around. I may have contacted the madness because I found myself retouching my CV by the end of the day.

The next day we learned about work-life balance, work ethics, and preparation for NYSC (A national program every Nigerian graduate is expected to partake in). During the session that prepared us for NYSC, a recent alumnus was added to the conversation via a video conference, and he told us about his experience in NYSC.

We all noted this one particular experience where he stood out for a remarkable accomplishment (I feel I should mention that this specific student graduated in the set before ours).

And I saw it happen again. Somehow, a speaker transformed an experience so many graduates dread into an experience we just couldn't wait to have. I could hear students around me asking their friends if they were reconsidering doing NYSC.

My own friend told me that she was considering completing her NYSC, and this was someone who, as at an hour ago, said she felt it was a waste of time. Again, it must have been a madness going around because I was smiling at the idea also (perhaps it's a new form of disease we haven't named).

By the third day, we'd finished another session on the World Of Work and were just having a session on corporate packaging when I randomly mentioned how I could not wait to be able to have my own P.A. This girl behind me asks her friend to be her P.A because she planned on being too busy, and I heard him say, "me that's going to be an employer of youths. You should even be helping me look for a P.A".

It's amusing, isn't it? For the past three days of the program, every speaker seemed to never miss the chance to tell us how we are special. How we are great, visionaries, innovators... different; and that this program was designed to ensure we had the necessary mindset to tackle the challenges we would face during our journey of accomplishing that greatness.

I thought it was amusing. What power does one believe they have to motivate youths of an already depressed generation in a third-world country? But there it was, happening before my very eyes.

That evening, our Chancellor spoke to us about leadership. Every student around me seemed to be feeling the same kind of fire I was feeling. I didn't see it in their eyes. I just knew it - the fire was too hot for only me to feel it.

That night when my friends and I were talking in my room concerning our dreams and ambitions, I heard one of my most pessimistic friends caution us from saying "God when" as though it would never happen, to saying "God soon" because it will happen.

As I write this, I wish I could say I knew exactly what transpires during this program. I wish I could rationally say that the success among Covenant University graduates was simply a coincidence.?A mere thing of luck. In no way related to any efforts the university has put in, but I have seen the people around me change in the last three days. They have changed far more than they did in the four years we have spent together.

So I can only conclude that this program is why we stand out; if this were to be the only good thing I achieved from coming here, then I have absolutely no regrets. I write this now as a sort of virtual time capsule. I wonder if, in the next 5, 10, 20 years, my friends and I will still have the fire we've gotten from this program.

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