Nursing student steps out of her comfort zone to find a home at UC

For nursing student Tesleemah Oyewale coming to the University of Cincinnati meant stepping out of her comfort zone. And hardly for the first time.

She had moved to the United States from Nigeria just a few years earlier, following the death of her father.

“We hardly had anything when we got here,” Tesleemah says. “We were scraping together to afford my first year of college.”

Aspiring to become a nurse and never afraid of the unknown, Tesleemah applied to more than 20 colleges. She received 15 acceptance letters, but to her dismay, “each and every single one I looked at wasn’t offering me enough scholarship support.”

Assessing her options, Tesleemah chose UC because it was the most affordable. She assumed the necessary loans for her freshman year and kept pushing forward. She took advantage of peer-led tutoring sessions, which helped her through an especially difficult course.

“I made sure my grades were super high and my GPA was high as well,” she says.

Her hard work paid off. The following year Tesleemah earned a place in the College of Nursing. Today, Tesleemah tells her mother, “Choosing UC was the best decision I’ve made so far.”

Scholarship support, Tesleemah says, was a game-changer. “I’m grateful that UC recognized my hard work because I’ve gotten numerous scholarships based on my grades and my involvement on campus,” she says. “Since my sophomore year I haven’t had to pay anything for school. Everything has been covered: my tuition, my room, my meals.”

As a result, Tesleemah was able to focus on nursing’s challenging curriculum. She also took another step out of her comfort zone by serving as a Peer Tutor to younger nursing students. “The impact I was able to make for incoming sophomores who were struggling with classes I had previously struggled with was just phenomenal,” she says. “At the end of the year they gave me a card that shared their favorite things about the session, and that just warmed my heart. UC makes sure there’s a student to support another student constantly, and being able to pay it forward is very rewarding for me.”

To the donors who have supported her education, Tesleemah is ever grateful. “You have impacted my life in ways that you don’t know,” she says. “Because of this, I’m almost able to graduate debt-free. I’m able to graduate with a degree in nursing and go further if I want to because of your support. So I say a big thank you. You are — and will always be — appreciated.”

In addition to tutoring, Tesleemah served as a mentor within iLEAD, which seeks to create a “family feeling” by attaching every incoming nursing student to a sophomore, junior and senior. Tesleemah also served as the student group leader for an International Nursing Clinical, a recent health-focused trip to Tanzania, East Africa. The experience in rural Tanzania, Tesleemah says, “gave me valuable perspective and insight into how healthcare works in other countries.”

After graduation in 2025, Tesleemah plans to pursue a master’s degree in midwifery with the aim of serving vulnerable and marginalized women — especially women of color and those with high-risk pregnancies.

“I’ve had family members birth their babies, and not everything goes as smoothly as they wanted, mostly because there was no one to advocate for them. Or when they told their providers something was wrong, they weren’t listened to,” she says. “I want to be that person who my patients can freely complain to, talk to. I will advocate for them, listen to them and give them the best patient-centered care.”

Featured image at top: Tesleemah Oyewale is a student in UC's College of Nursing. Photo/UC Alumni Association