To the MIT Planned Giving Community: 

I reached out to MIT recently to find out who funded a scholarship I received as an undergraduate. I’d been wanting to thank them since graduation but was nervous about reaching out, wondering whether they’d want to hear from me. I’m fortunate now to be in a position where I’m able to start thinking about paying it forward, though, and wanted the first step to be thanking the person who helped me. 

Through MIT, I learned that the scholarship was provided by the Towle Scholarship Fund, which was created by a bequest. I was sad to learn that the donor has passed and that I cannot personally thank them for their generosity. But I’m glad to have the opportunity to address the MIT planned giving community to show how a planned gift can make a difference in the life of a student.

The scholarship funded by the Towle family’s bequest allowed me to stay at MIT for a fifth year after changing my major to Course 6, electrical engineering and computer science. It also allowed me to add a creative writing minor, which I wanted to do after completing an internship at Microsoft—I realized the importance of being able to communicate your ideas to build things and to rally people around you. I ended up settling in Seattle and spending seven years at Microsoft as a program manager before cofounding the startup Symphoni, a platform that helps small businesses succeed from the ground up. Symphoni has since been acquired by Remitly, and I’m working on a number of new projects now. My MIT education taught me how to learn, not what to learn, and I’ve found that that empowers you to go out there and do pretty much anything.

“From my personal experience, I can clearly see that education is the key to building a better world.”

It would have been extremely difficult for me to attend MIT without financial support. My family emigrated from Nigeria to the United States when I was 12 years old, and I thought at the time that it was more like coming over on a time machine than an airplane—that’s how different it seemed. I have always been interested in electronics, dismantling things and trying to figure out how they work, and that expanded to computers after moving here. When I was accepted to MIT and attended Campus Preview Weekend, I saw the “mens et manus” attitude reflected everywhere: if you want to know how something works, tinker with it. Don’t be afraid. Just do it. After that weekend, you could not have convinced me to go to any other college.

But my future could have gone in a very different direction. It took a last-minute push from a high school teacher to get me to apply to MIT at all. Since the college system functions so differently in Nigeria, my family and I hadn’t even considered it. For that reason, I actually don’t like the term “follow your dreams,” because your dreams are limited to what you’ve seen. I couldn’t have dreamt this future as a kid in Nigeria. 

My ultimate goal is to open up the world for others the way it was opened up for me by creating new educational opportunities in Africa and around the world, even here in the United States, so more people can follow beyond their dream. From my personal experience, I can clearly see that education is the key to building a better world. To the Towle family and all who support scholarships at MIT, I cannot thank you enough.

Sincerely,
Omobayonle Olatunji ’10