Oluwaseum Mesele

A fantastic first class undergraduate degree and a passion for his subject brought Nigerian Oluwaseun Mesele’s application for Cardiff’s Commonwealth Shared Scholarship to the attention of the deciding scholarship committee.

Rising above nearly 60 other applicants, Mesele is enjoying winning this highly prestigious award, enabling him to study his chosen programme, MSc Physical Organic Chemistry.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Mesele’s ambition is to be an academic, and he already held an offer of a teaching fellowship in the US when he received the news of his award at Cardiff University, providing full funding for his studies.

After receiving advice from his professors back in Lagos, and researching Cardiff’s School of Chemistry thoroughly, he realised that Cardiff held the key to his future as an academic, and offered the expertise he required in order to progress to his PhD.

"Cardiff was the only university I chose. I had a friend who had studied with me in Nigeria who was now studying engineering at Cardiff, and so I contacted him to ask for advice about the University. Other friends across the UK advised me on the UK culture and weather, so I knew what to expect when I arrived. But Cardiff is better than everything I experienced before in the world of academia; you have all the academic resources at your disposal, including the library and online learning systems, and the faculty provide plenty of help."

Beyond his studies, Mesele is also enjoying discovering the shopping opportunities in Cardiff’s city centre: "You can get everything you need so easily! The city is so big and yet so small, and there’s no fear of getting lost".

In the future, there is little doubt that Mesele will go on to achieve great things. He dreams of becoming an academic, of touching people’s lives through his scientific discoveries, and to act as an inspiration to the other young Nigerians who will come after him.

But for now, with the new friends that he’s made in the Nigerian Student Society, at his church, and his multicultural flatmates (Mesele describes the Indian, Pakistani and Nigerian flatmates as "awesome people!"), he finds Cardiff a "home away from home".