This is Akintunde Ahmad.
And to me he’s what Oakland is all about.
He graduated from Oakland Tech in 2014 with a 5.0 G.P.A.
He scored 2100 on his SAT.
He played baseball.
He played in the Young Musicians Choral Orchestra.
And now he attends one of the best universities in the world.
He now studies at Yale.
Ahmad has made it.
But it wasn’t easy.
He told SF Gate:
“There’s plenty of people I know who have been killed.
I could write a list starting in elementary school of all the people we grew up with who have been killed.”
But now Ahmad has beaten the odds.
And he wants other people growing up in the inner city to realize that they can do it too.
He says:
“I want to use my life and personal experiences as a testament to what a black kid from an inner-city in America is capable of.”
Ahmad is proof that they are capable of doing anything they put their mind to.
