The Life I Chose After the Life I Planned: Leaving OAU Law, Starting Again, and Graduating First Class

After I shared that I had graduated with First Class Honours, someone left a comment on LinkedIn that stayed with me.

They said, respectfully, that I had skipped too many chapters. How do you go from Law to marketing, leave school, start over, work with dream brands, travel to more than ten countries, win awards, and still graduate with a First Class?

At first, I laughed because the summary sounded too clean to be my life. Then I thought about it properly and realised the person was right. I had posted the ending, but not the years of uncertainty, luck, labour, shame, help, and difficult decisions that made the ending possible.

However, stories like mine can make life look more deliberate than it was. You survive a confusing period, connect the dots backwards, and suddenly everything starts to look like strategy. The detours become “redirection.” The accidents become “alignment.” The people who helped you quietly disappear into the background while you become the main character of a story that was never yours alone.

I know better than that. Work has been involved in my story, but so have timing, privilege, friendship, audacity, grace, and the kindness of people who mentioned my name in rooms I could not enter by myself.

So this is me filling in some of the missing chapters.

The Dream That Came First

In 2017, I completed secondary school and graduated as class valedictorian. My plan was simple: study Law at Obafemi Awolowo University and become a top-shot lawyer.

I come from a family of lawyers, so the dream felt natural. It was also easy to explain. “I’m studying Law” carried weight.

Then JAMB happened.

I scored 245. It was decent, but for Law at OAU, it did not feel safe. I did well in the Post-UTME and got in anyway. That was one of my first lessons in how effort and luck can meet each other halfway.

Like many OAU students, I had to wait at home for months before resumption. While waiting, I started a blog called Better Than Good. I just wanted to write, publish, and have something that was mine.

That blog introduced me to SEO, though I did not understand it properly until 2018, when I resumed school and met Tobi Abiodun. Tobi introduced me to freelance writing, and that changed everything.

I do not think Tobi knew he was opening a door that would change my life.

Until then, writing was something I did because I liked it. After that, I started seeing that words could become money, work, access, and eventually, a career.

Law Student by Day, Freelancer by Night

When I resumed at OAU, I was still committed to Law. I joined organisations, participated in competitions, secured internships at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Chris Ogunbanjo LP, and Thomas J Attorneys, and even tried student politics. I lost my class election in my first semester and retired almost immediately.

But freelance writing was already pulling me elsewhere.

At first, it was a way to make money. Then it became a way to build proof outside school. I started to see how writing could become strategy, and how strategy could become marketing.

OAU also complicated my relationship with Law. I met brilliant people and built resilience there, but the classroom often fell below what I expected. I was learning more from work, projects, organisations, and the internet than from lectures.

Then the strikes came.

During the pandemic break, my plans for internships at Aluko & Oyebode and Taxaide fell through. That interruption redirected me. I wrote the first edition of my book on completing online courses, worked with Strictly Law Business, Forthserve, and later became Content and Community Manager at Week of Saturdays.

Some of those opportunities came without formal applications, but they were not random. I had been writing, pitching, reaching out, and making my work visible. Busola Ajala became interested after I pitched her a book idea. Fabiawari Boma reached out on LinkedIn. Kelechi Udoagwu offered me the Week of Saturdays role after I had first contacted her in 2019 and stayed in touch.

Kelechi’s offer mattered because Week of Saturdays gave shape to what I had been circling. I began to understand B2B SaaS marketing, positioning, community, and the work of helping companies explain themselves clearly.

Around the same period, I got into the United Nations Millennium Fellowship and started Digivention, a project that eventually impacted over 1,200 young people with digital skills. That was my first real exposure to social impact work, even before I had the language for where it would later lead me.

By the time OAU resumed, my life had shifted. I was still writing exams and staying on a 2:1, but my interest in Law had faded. I read when exams were close, did what I needed to survive academically, and returned to the work that felt more alive.

That season came with fear. I was afraid of wasting time, disappointing people who still saw me as a future lawyer, and building a career online that might not survive real adulthood. I worried that I was chasing momentum instead of direction.

So in 2021, I became more deliberate. I kept writing online, growing my newsletter, cold-emailing, and hosting Tell It All, where I interviewed high flyers. Most of it did not pay off immediately, but it gave me a portfolio, visibility, and confidence.

Later that year, I joined VEC Studio after sending Victor Eduoh a connection note that made him take interest in my work. 

A few months later, at the start of 2022, I landed a role at PiggyVest. Then another long school break happened. I rented an apartment in Lekki and started what I jokingly called my big-boy life. The joke did not last long. I had to leave my agency job, and PiggyVest alone could not comfortably carry my bills.

I wanted to grow faster.

Then Stears happened.

The Bet That Made Me Look Stupid

I got a senior Content Marketing role at Stears, a company I admired. I had applied almost randomly, and somehow got in, even though the assessment was one of the hardest I had done at the time. Pearle and Yunus helped me think through parts of it when I was too close to the work to see clearly.

The role came at a complicated time. Stears was preparing to relaunch Stears Elections ahead of the 2023 general elections, the role was hybrid, and OAU resumed around the same period.

So I had to choose.

Returning to OAU meant finishing Law in my fourth year. Choosing Stears meant following the career I had already started building. Law was respectable and easy to explain. Marketing was risky, but it felt closer to the life I wanted.

I knew how it looked. I had spent years in OAU and was close enough to the end for people to ask why I could not just finish. Some people thought I was under a spell. Some thought I had become arrogant because I was making money. Some could not understand why anyone would leave something that still looked valuable on paper.

I understood them, but I also knew what staying would cost me. A Law degree would have been useful, but by then I no longer wanted that life badly enough to give it more years.

I chose Stears.

Professionally, it paid off. Personally, it left an insecurity I did not always admit. I was working with brilliant people, many with degrees from top schools. I could hold my own, but the unfinished degree still sat somewhere in my mind. I had skills, experience, and results, but I also had a gap that mattered to me.

As my ambitions grew, that gap became harder to ignore. I wanted an MBA someday, possibly from an Ivy League school. I had started imagining a future that could include a PhD. My interests were also expanding into social impact, inclusive innovation, and development, and I knew formal education still had a place in the larger life I wanted to build.

So when I saw an advert for Miva Open University, I applied to study Business Management.

I started again.

Starting Again at Miva

Starting again humbled me. I had already started working full-time, paying bills, building a career, and making adult decisions, but I still had to return to assignments, exams, and study schedules.

My first year at Miva was difficult. Stears was demanding, and school required attention I did not always have. At one point, I told a friend I might drop out again. What scared me was not only the workload; it was the thought that OAU might become a pattern. I did not want to become someone who kept leaving things unfinished.

So I held on to why I started. I wanted future academic options. I wanted closure. I wanted to prove to myself that leaving OAU did not mean I could not finish. I also wanted to prove a few people wrong because, yes, spite has carried many noble dreams.

I finished my first year with a First Class.

That result gave me proof that the goal was possible. In my second year, I moved to RemotePass as Product and Content Marketing Manager. The work got more demanding, and I was travelling, learning, and trying to grow professionally while keeping school afloat.

I finished that year with a First Class too.

By my third year, my responsibilities at RemotePass had grown, and I had co-founded EmpowerQ. That changed the weight of my life. EmpowerQ was tied to community, dignity, exclusion, and real people whose lives were connected to the work. There were partnership calls, strategy documents, money worries, team worries, programme worries, and days when the work felt bigger than our resources.

Still, I kept going.

The Semester I Needed to Win at Something

Towards the end of my first semester in final year, I got laid off from RemotePass after asking for a raise when they tried to “promote” me without increasing my pay.

It hurt more than I expected. I had left OAU for this career path, so when work broke my heart, it felt personal. For a moment, it felt like the life I had chosen was turning around to embarrass me.

I was angry, embarrassed, and tired. More than anything, I needed proof that I was still capable of excellence.

So I read.

School gave me somewhere to put the pain. At a time when work had made me feel disposable, studying gave me structure. If I read well, I could answer well. If I took my notes seriously, I could walk into the exam hall with some control.

Some days, I opened my materials with anger still in my body. I made notes, revised, and reduced the noise around me to the next course, the next topic, the next page, the next answer I needed to understand in my own words.

That semester, I got a perfect 5.0 GPA.

By the next semester, I had started a fractional role as Head of Product Marketing at an AI visibility startup. The work was demanding, but I understood my study rhythm better. I started early, made notes in my own words, and took my project seriously.

I wanted the ending to be flawless. Maybe because so much of the journey had been difficult to explain, I wanted a final result nobody could argue with.

The project did not go as well as I hoped, and my CGPA dropped from 4.68 to 4.58.

It still pained me. I had attached more meaning to the number than I wanted to admit. I wanted the result to silence every doubt, including my own. When the CGPA dropped, shame found another opening.

Then I had to remember the full story.

I had left Law, started again, worked demanding jobs, helped build EmpowerQ, travelled, won, failed, doubted myself, survived a layoff, and still made it to the end with distinction.

I graduated with First Class Honours in Business Management, and I am learning to receive that without arguing against my own joy.

What the Detour Taught Me

I have been surprised by the reception to this milestone because, in my head, I had already started reducing it. I told myself the school was young, the course was Business Management, and maybe too many people graduated with First Class for it to be that special. That is how easily shame can disguise itself as objectivity. It keeps moving the goalpost until nothing you do is enough to deserve your own joy.

Looking back, I do not think the lesson is that everyone should take the kind of risk I took. I left OAU because, by then, I had built enough evidence that marketing had become a serious path for me. I had work, direction, market proof, and a clearer sense of what the decision could make possible. Risk can be brave, but it should not be lazy.

Furthermore, small proof compounds. The article you wrote years ago, the email you sent without expecting much, the relationship you nurtured before you needed it, the work you did when no one was clapping yet; all of it can become useful later. Nothing is truly wasted when you are paying attention.

It also taught me that nobody succeeds alone, no matter how individual the certificate looks. Tobi, Busola, Boma, Kelechi, Victor, Pearle, Yunus, Imeh, and many others left fingerprints on this story. Some opened doors. Some helped me prepare for the doors. Some reminded me of things I would have missed. Some simply made a hard season feel less lonely.

And perhaps most importantly, I learned that you can outgrow something you once genuinely wanted without turning that old dream into a lie. Law was real for me. So was marketing. So was the insecurity of starting again. So is the pride I feel now. A life can hold all of those truths without needing to flatten any of them.

Over to you

I do not think my story is a template anyone should copy blindly. Leaving school, changing degrees, or taking a risky career bet can go very differently depending on your context, timing, support system, finances, and the opportunities available to you. I am proud of the choices I made, but I am also aware that risk is not automatically wise simply because it worked out in the end.

What I do think my story shows is that one decision does not have to trap the rest of your life. You can outgrow a dream you once genuinely wanted. You can leave a path without turning your whole journey into a failure. You can start again without starting from nothing, because every experience, even the confusing ones, can become useful in the next version of your life.

So here is the question I want to leave you with:

What part of your life are you still forcing yourself to continue, not because it still fits, but because you are afraid of what people will say if you choose differently?