Growing up in an upper-middle class family in Nigeria, the second daughter of a mechanical engineer, she had everything she wanted and her parents were able to support her through her first semester. But from the second semester on, paying tuition wasn’t that easy.
“I was the first of five siblings to study at Temple, so although my parents supported me for my first year, it was tough, when my other siblings started enrolling at Temple, to support all of us on their Nigerian income,” said Ofoegbu. “I had to get a job to help pay my tuition and help support my sisters and brothers.”
She first found work with Temple’s audio-visual services, but at the end of the semester, her tuition still wasn’t fully paid and she had the next semester’s tuition to worry about. Ineligible for scholarships because she was not a U.S. citizen, Ofoegbu began working as many hours as she could. But, because she was an international student, she could only work a maximum of 20 hours per week under the law.
She worked a host of jobs around university, including a student representative with the Campus Police, an office assistant with the Faculty Senate, a tutor and classroom assistant in the Temple Math and Science Resource Center, a funds solicitor with the Temple Telefund, a computer lab consultant and a tutor in the College of Engineering. Finally, Temple told her she had to stop working all those hours.
“At first, I thought Temple telling me I could only work 20 hours per week hurt me because I couldn’t make my $1,000-a-month payment, but it actually helped me because I could focus more on academics and my grade point average,” she said.
She also caught the attention of electrical and computer engineering Associate Professor John Helferty, then the department chair, who helped her in attaining some student aid from the university for her last two years as an undergraduate.
“So I just had to work to pay for living expenses for me, my sister and my two brothers, who had come from Nigeria at this point,” she said.
As Ofoegbu was completing her bachelor’s degree in 2003, her parents moved to the Philadelphia area, where her father, now retired, is now pursuing a master’s degree from Philadelphia Biblical University. Because he is here on a student visa, he can work only 20 hours per week, so Ofoegbu began contributing to their living expenses as well.
While an undergraduate, Ofoegbu had several professors encourage her to consider graduate studies in engineering. One, Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Robert Yantorno, saw enough promise in her that he offered to nominate her for a fellowship.
“I didn’t even know that he took notice of me,” she said. “I didn’t get an ‘A’ in his signal processing class, one of the few engineering classes that I didn’t get an ‘A’ in. He asked if I would consider signal processing as a field of study, and I said no because I had not done that well in his class.”
But Yantorno, who became her graduate advisor, asked her to consider it and if she didn’t like it, she could always switch to another field and would have the fellowship to support her. “It became a little easier now; I didn’t work all those other jobs because I was now getting financial support from the university,” she said.
In fact, it became easy enough for Ofoegbu to earn her master’s degree in just a year and a half and her doctorate in two-and-a-half years. At this point, she had abandoned the thought of working for an oil company and started to lean toward a career in academia.
She had started teaching as an undergraduate while working in the Math and Science Resource Center and continued as a teaching assistant while a graduate student.
“It is fun teaching, especially when the students get to see something they haven’t seen before and then they get to discover it for themselves,” said Ofoegbu, who will begin a teaching position in engineering at Howard University in the fall. “There are two ways you can teach: You can give all the answers and the time, or you can get the students to discover the answer, that way they will never forget it.”
And the Temple experience has taught Ofoegbu something she will never forget.
“Temple was the whole package; Temple made me who I am today,” she said. “I am now very resourceful. I have discovered I can make things happen with very little or with nothing at all. I think it is because of this experience.
“Through everything that happened, the only way I was ever going to quit was if Temple said, ‘Go home and forget it,’” she added. “I didn’t quit, but Temple didn’t let me quit either. If I had it all to do again, I would choose Temple over and over and over.”
|
