With highly educated parents and siblings, Michael Eniolade faces high expectations from his family, who resides in Nigeria in a southwestern inland state called Osun State, a little northeast of Lagos.
“We value education,” Michael says.
Michael’s mother has a bachelor’s degree in biology and taught for a living. His eldest brother is a computer engineer with a master’s degree in IT and his second eldest brother studied agricultural engineering, while his younger brother studied English and international relations and also aspires to study in the U.S.
Michael initially wanted to study medicine. It was his father, a pastor with a master’s in geography from the University of Nottingham, who, seeing opportunities in tech, advised him to study computer science instead.
“Computer science wasn’t as popular back then in Nigeria as it is now,” Michael says.
Though not without much sadness leaving his family behind, with encouragement from his mom and having earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science in his home country, Michael came to the U.S. in December of 2016. The opportunity to study computer information systems at California Miramar University (CMU) came to fruition within an unexpected timeframe, only a couple of months after submitting his application. He expects to complete his master’s degree in October of 2018.
Through a friend, Michael learned about a CCNA course (Cisco Certified Network Associate Routing & Switching certification) at San Diego Continuing Education and decided to enroll, all while still completing his coursework at CMU.
“I decided to take advantage of this opportunity,” Michael says. “It helped give me a broader knowledge of IT. I saw this as something I needed to work on concurrently to be able to achieve my dreams.”
Michael is interested in maximizing the use of data to make the best possible business decisions.
“I want to be an entrepreneur—I want to bring more innovation to the software development and machine learning industries,” he says. “I’m working towards making more use of data, like predictions. Data keeps expanding every day. Unfortunately, we don’t have the right tools to effectively mine this data to bring out the best use of information. I’m foreseeing opportunities to effectively mine data from different sources about different subjects.”
After learning about CCNA, Michael enrolled in a mobile applications development course, where his instructor Victor Campos told him about TechHire.
With the help of the TechHire team at the San Diego Workforce Partnership, Michael started in a paid internship at Journeys Map, an application that helps users land their dream job or career by charting career paths and sharing new occupations based on users’ interests.
This internship was Michael’s first job in the U.S. that aligns closely with his interest in information assurance, the practice of assuring information and managing risks related to the use, processing, storage, and transmission of information or data and the systems and processes used for those purposes.
At Journeys, Michael performed data analysis, writing scripts to automate data processing.
“This was my first introduction in the U.S. to something that I really liked and wanted to do,” Michael says. “TechHire is a dream come true.”
As for his family and his home country, Michael says, “[They] made a lot of investments in me, both emotionally and financially. I want to give back to my family and to Nigeria.”