From Medicine to Mathematics: My Unexpected Journey into AI Research
I was supposed to be a doctor. I grew up in northern Nigeria, moving from state to state as my father's banking career took our family across the region. It was a childhood of constant adjustment — new schools, new friends, new cities — but mathematics was always the same everywhere I went. Reliable, consistent, and somehow mine. When I was admitted to Bayero University Kano to study medicine, it felt like the natural destination. Medicine was prestigious, purposeful, the kind of career that made sense to everyone around me. I had worked hard to get there. ...