THE CURRENCY OF A NAME

Dr. Yetunde A. Omede carries two worlds inside her, Nigeria and New Jersey, heritage and hard-won tenure, excellence and the daily work of expanding rooms that were never built for her. She has never wasted either one.

There is a particular ritual in many Nigerian households where a child is told, early and often, that their name must never be dragged. The word for it, in the texture of lived experience rather than any dictionary, is this: your name is the only thing you will carry from every room you enter and every room you leave. Dr. Yetunde A. Omede grew up in one of those households, in New Jersey, thousands of miles from Lagos, and this lesson has been a blueprint for who she intended to become.

Two Worlds, One Standard

She is Nigerian-American, born and raised in New Jersey, and she is careful to tell you that growing up in a Nigerian household did not split her; it equipped her. "What I've been intentional about," she says, "is learning to blend both cultures and draw the very best from each." It sounds simple when she says it. It is, of course, not simple at all.

From Nigeria, she absorbed the premium placed on education and excellence, the understanding that excellence is not a mood or a strategy; it is a standard. "The expectation was never simply to participate," she explains. "It was to excel, in whatever room you find yourself in, whether volunteer work or a senior professional role." There is no arrogance in how she says this. It is the kind of statement that sounds like it was learned young, repeated often, and tested across decades of professional life.

She carries, too, the specific understanding that your education is something no one can ever take from you, that it is therefore not something to be taken lightly. From America, she took the democratic faith in hard work and merit: the belief that showing up fully is its own kind of argument. "When you blend those two frameworks together," she says, pausing to give the thought room, "African excellence and American tenacity, you create something powerful."

"Your name and your reputation are your most important currency. People will forget your title long before they forget how you made them feel or the quality of work you put forward." - Dr. Yetunde A. Omede

This is the foundation. Not a dramatic origin story with a single turning point, but something more durable, a set of values that have, over time, become inseparable from the person herself.

The Muscle of Decisive Thinking

Ask Dr. Omede about the moment that changed everything, and she will gently resist the question. There was no lightning bolt, she says, no single crossroads she can point to and say, there, that is where the story shifted. What there was, instead, was a series of decisions. The decision to major in journalism and media studies. The decision to deepen her education through a PhD in global affairs. The decision to ground herself not just in academia, but in practitioner-based work, including at the United Nations. Each one stacked on the previous.

"Most of those decisions did not feel like risks in the moment," she says. "They felt like necessities." She speaks about decision-making the way a trainer speaks about a muscle: you build it incrementally, in the smaller moments that feel low-stakes, so that it is strong and ready when the stakes are not. "It starts small," she says. "Who you spend your time with. What direction do you choose to move in? What you're willing to walk away from."

She is, she will tell you, someone with a risk management mindset. She can see what is ahead and can read a situation for its threats. But she has learned and this distinction matters to her not to let risk paralyse her. "I let it inform," she says. "There's a big difference." That distinction, unglamorous as it sounds, has carried her from a New Jersey childhood to directing civic engagement at a state university and to classrooms where she teaches the very global affairs she has spent her career moving through.

To Navigate the Intersection

To be a Black woman in professional spaces, Dr. Omede says plainly, is rarely to navigate only one barrier. It is to exist at the intersection of race and gender, often simultaneously, and sometimes without the clarity of knowing which force is at work in a given moment. There are moments, she says, in any career, when you look around and see colleagues being elevated to positions for which your qualifications are equal or greater, and the decision still does not go your way.

"And you're left asking yourself: is it the race? Is it the gender? The answer is often that it can be both." She does not say this with bitterness. She says it the way someone reports a weather condition, observed, named, and moved through.

What she decided, early and firmly, was that she would refuse to carry that awareness as paralysis. She sees the dynamics. She does not pretend otherwise. But she moves anyway, because she holds a belief she articulates with a clarity that sounds like it has been tested and survived testing: representation yields returns.

"When institutions fill their leadership with only one type of person, they are actively doing themselves a disservice. When we are given the seat, we don't just fill it, we expand it." - Dr. Yetunde A. Omede

The qualified women exist, she says. The Black women exist. The young women with different perspectives and essential contributions exist. "We exist. And when we are given the seat, we don't just fill it, we expand it." She says it with the calm certainty of someone who has been at those tables, who has felt the room adjust to accommodate what it was not originally designed to include, and who has decided that the adjusting is not her problem. The showing up is.

The Value Crisis Inside the Institution

Dr. Omede works across two sectors, higher education and global affairs and she has watched both from close enough to see the cracks. The greatest misconception people carry when entering these spaces, she says, is that institutions rooted in ethics and public good are somehow immune to the very problems they exist to address. "People step in thinking they are entering a space free from politics, discrimination, or institutional dysfunction. And then reality sets in."

What she has observed is what she calls a value crisis, a gradual forgetting of core purpose. In higher education, the shift toward a business model has come at a cost: somewhere along the way, universities lost sight of what they were fundamentally built for, which is to cultivate people who can think critically, act with social responsibility, and solve problems. The same fractures run through global governance, where governments are not, at their deepest level, administrative bodies; they are structures whose primary obligation is quality of life for their citizens.

She does not speak of this with despair. She speaks of it with the focused energy of someone who has identified a problem and is already building toward solutions through new programmes, through mentorship, through writing, through the patient work of building partnerships across sectors. "Impact does not live in a single place," she says. "And neither do I."

What She Would Tell Her Younger Self

She does not hesitate when she is asked what she would go back and say to the version of herself just beginning, the girl in New Jersey, everything still ahead of her, the weight of a name not yet fully understood. The answer comes quickly, as if it has been ready for a while.

"Everything works out for your good." She says it simply, without sentimentality. Not as fortune-cookie comfort, but as something harder-won: the perspective that comes from standing far enough from the closed doors to see where they redirected you. The disappointments that felt like failure were, she now understands, recalibrations. Moving you away from what was never aligned. Positioning you closer to where you were actually supposed to be.

"Not every closed door is a loss," she says. "And not every opportunity that presents itself is actually meant for you. Learning to discern the difference is one of the most important skills you can develop." The sooner you embrace that truth, she says, the lighter you carry the journey.

"Trust the process completely. Trust it when it is clear and trust it when it is not. Because looking back, even the detours made sense." - Dr. Yetunde A. Omede

The Room Keeps Growing

To the young African woman in the diaspora today, watching from a distance, wondering whether there is space for her, Dr. Omede's advice is not complicated. Start networking early, she says. It already surrounds you: your family, your community, your teachers, your professors. Ask questions. Send the email to the stranger. "You never know where a simple hello can take you." Learn to communicate your thoughts in a way that people can understand. Know yourself early enough that you do not mistakenly take on someone else's projections in place of your own vision.

Be curious. Be confident. And trust what you carry. "That is more than enough to begin."

The legacy Dr. Omede is building is not a monument to herself. It is a door held open. She wants the next generation of young African leaders, especially young women, to understand that their heritage is not something to be explained away or softened in professional rooms. It is their greatest asset. That their name is worth protecting. That every closed door is a redirection.

She says it, too, as a mother. Her deepest personal hope is that her own children go further than she did, carrying with them a deep understanding of social responsibility, the knowledge that their lives are connected to something larger than themselves. The programmes she builds, the students she mentors, the partnerships she forges, and the values she pours into her children: all of it pointing in the same direction.

Making sure the room keeps growing. And that the next generation walks in with more than we had.

Dr. Yetunde A. Omede,

Director, Office of Community and Civic Engagement and Professor of Global Affairs and Politics at State University of New York-FSC