by Ashley House
Joseph Omo-Osagie is an advisor, counselor, and teacher for Parkland College. Originally from Lagos, Nigeria, Joe follow in the footsteps of his father and older sister when he moved to Champaign-Urbana at 18 years old to attend the University of Illinois. “I come from an academic family,” Joe said. “My mother was a high school teacher and my father was a college professor, he did his postdoc at UIUC so it was an obvious choice.” Joe said it was never a question of if he’d go to college, but where, as he’d considered many schools all over the world.
Growing up in Nigeria, Joe learned 3 of the hundreds of Nigerian languages and English. “My schooling in Nigeria was very extensive and it was very good, I feel that I worked harder in high school than in college. The expectations were very different there than here,” he said. He went on to explain that final exams to graduate high school lasted 6 weeks, with 3 separate exams for every subject you were tested on. “Multiple choice was a very small part of it. You wrote essays explaining what you knew about each concept and each idea. Comprehensive exams really were comprehensive. You were expected to remember what you learned years earlier.” When asked of life in Nigeria and what he wanted people to know about it, he told me that Nigeria, and especially Lagos, is complex and thriving. “It’s dynamic, it’s innovative, it’s crazy like any major city of the world. [Lagos] is a metropolis of over 10 million people.”
After moving to Illinois, Joe earned a bachelor’s in political science from UIUC, with hopes to go into international law and work for the United Nations. Before his senior year, however, he realized he could not afford to finish his schooling as an international student and was briefly considered an illegal immigrant. He spent the year working and realized that international law would be great to study and practice, but what he really wanted was to work directly with the people he was looking to help. He went back to school, finished his degree in political science, and then worked with several volunteer organizations and helped open a women’s emergency shelter, which lead to his decision to earn his master’s degree in psychology and counseling.
He takes a lot of pride in his job at Parkland, and loves the versatility of what he can do here. One thing he wishes to improve, however, is how Parkland utilizes diversity. “Some students are missing out on a bunch of great things they could learn from the international population, I’m so surprised some students don’t realize there are over 60 countries represented here at Parkland. I get in trouble because I‘m so excited about them learning about the world and I want them to take those non western classes.” Joe really wants more students to take advantage of the classes available at Parkland and to take more interest in the diverse international population the college has, as he believes we can all learn so much more about life and the world in general by doing so.
Now married and a father of 2, Joe aspires to inspire his children and others to constantly strive to be better than they were before. “What I want to accomplish the most is to consistently create a socratic dialogue. An unexamined life is not worth living, you’ve gotta be able to examine your life,” Joe said. “I want for students not to say that they just passed my class but to say that they are better human beings for being in my class. I want students to leave my office not with an answer but with a better question about who they want to be.”