Pre-College 40th Anniversary Alumni Profile: Naomi Adjei Is a Resident Physician

It’s a Thursday morning and Naomi Adjei is a bit tired, having recently finished another 13-hour shift as an obstetrics and gynecology resident at Yale New Haven Hospital. “It’s hard!” she said with a laugh. “The hours are hard. … [But] I’m learning clinical skills. I’m learning surgical skills. … You’re learning content, but also how to be a professional.”

Becoming a doctor is a dream come true for Adjei, a first-generation college student who grew up in Tema, Ghana, and immigrated to Newark, N.J., in December 2004. She started at Weequahic High School as a second-semester sophomore the following month and the next two summers participated in Talent Search, a federally funded program administered by NJIT’s Center for Pre-College Programs (CPCP). Talent Search provides academic instruction and motivation along with field trips, college tours, tutoring and more to sixth- through 12th-graders.

“Talent Search was the first organized [activity] I did when I moved to the U.S.,” remembered Adjei, who learned of the program when then CPCP counselor, Giannelli Aldo, came to her high school with information and to recruit.

Adjei took pre-calculus as part of the program and did so well that, with instructor Jimmy Hayes’s support, she was allowed to take additional pre-college classes at NJIT through a special grant. She earned 20 college credits for courses over the summer and after school during the academic year that included pre-calc, calculus, industrial organization and management, physics, writing and more. Of her pre-college education at the university, she remarked, “Personally, I feel it definitely got me ready for college. … It supplemented the learning that I did in my high school.

“I found that STEM was very hard in my actual school, because my teachers didn’t have the resources to build the experiments that we needed,” she noted. “Whereas in the pre-college classes … it was a different level of academic rigor.”

Adjei says Aldo served informally as a personal coach to her, helping her with applications for colleges and scholarships, bringing her to Manhattan for SAT tutoring, and sending her care packages at Cornell University, where Adjei received her undergraduate degree (she also has a medical degree from Brown University, a master’s in education from Johns Hopkins University and an MPH from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health). The two keep in touch to this day.

“I am very much indebted to her,” Adjei said of Aldo, adding, “Talent Search made all the difference [for me].”     

Fondest memory of CPCP: “Right across the quad from the pre-college office was the auditorium where we’d usually get lunch. My family’s very traditional, so that was my first time ever having baked ziti and breadsticks. I also liked being with kids from other high schools and felt challenged by my peers.”

The Center for Pre-College Programs was established in 1979 in order to increase access to scientific and technological fields among traditionally underrepresented populations and to improve the teaching of science and mathematics in secondary and elementary schools. CPCP serves more than 3,000 students and their teachers annually through a variety of programs.