PKG Fellowships: Ade Oyewole (MBA ’22)
Meet Ade Oyewole, who recently received his MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Ade is currently serving as a Summer ’22 PKG Fellow. Learn more about his aspirations and successes here.
Ade was born and raised in Nigeria, which informs his PKG destination for driving change this summer. Reminiscing on the fact that he grew up in a small town and in his childhood aspirations, Ade shared he’s always been passionate about vehicles and cars, which inspired him to pursue a career in mechanical engineering and attend MIT to pursue a career in automotive work. Upon achieving that milestone, Ade realized his true passion was to impact people’s lives, which empowered him to co-found a community outreach program in Nigeria that transformed his mindset around impact. His leadership experience exposed him to the beauty of driving impact, which made him think deeply about pursuing an MBA. Throughout his search, he looked into various schools but shared he was blown away when he visited the MIT website and learned about Sloan. Ade enthusiastically shared he’s had a great experience!
When it comes to his trajectory with the PKG Center, Ade shared he looked into the Center to enact social impact, which informed his goals and objectives. He had a project he’d been working on in Nigeria and believed the PKG Center would be an asset in advancing his idea and learning more about the Center’s goals.
When it comes to his project endeavors, Ade is deeply captivated by his lived experiences attending school in Nigeria and often getting sick with waterborne illnesses. He revealed boarding school made many assume the water was clean, but Ade had an experience where he got ill with Typhoid. This experience made him wonder, “How am I getting sick?” which is a question he constantly pondered in his MIT classrooms. Finally, he had a professor challenge him to think about ways to find a solution to poor water quality in Nigeria, which is also how he connected to his mentor. Ade shared that his mentor empowered him to verify that water filtration was indeed a problem, so he went and saw if his hypothesis was correct.
Thereupon, Ade visited Nigeria for his wedding and took a couple of days to get some water samples. He learned his assumption was valid when the samples revealed that many homes have E. Coli and many other harmful bacteria. Eventually, this series of events inspired a call-to-action for Ade to raise awareness about the risks around poor water quality, which propelled him to pioneer the idea for his PKG project.
During his PKG Fellowship, Ade is working on installing and testing his UltraViolet water filtration prototype in households in Nigeria. He has tested his prototype and is looking forward to what it can do, particularly considering it is designed to operate in very poor water quality. Additionally, Ade also shares he’s looking forward to the long-term relationships he plans to create with people and the feedback he receives from the communities he partners with in his public service endeavors.
To conclude with some thoughts on what public service means to him, Ade shared that:
“For me, public service means dedication to a selfless cause. Which involves bringing health, gender, and wealth equality to places of inequality, giving voice to the voiceless, and fighting for justice in places where it’s lacking.”
Interested in PKG Fellowships? Visit our Fellowships page to learn more about future opportunities, upcoming dates and deadlines, and application guidelines!
Tags: Fellowships Summer 2022, Health, PKG Fellowships
