Originally from Nigeria, Tobi E. Afolayan is pursuing a dual major in international affairs and communications, along with a Spanish minor. He conducted the research for his Inquiry article through a research fellowship awarded by the McNair Graduate Opportunity Program at UNH. Tobi says that studying the African immigrant experience has given him a wider perspective on human experiences, as well as making him a more effective and scholarly researcher and writer. After obtaining a bachelor’s of art in May 2012, Tobi hopes to pursue a PhD in political science: “I’m really interested in furthering my research in African affairs,” says Tobi.
For the past fifteen years, Associate Professor Cliff Brown has taught and researched many topics within the Department of Sociology at UNH, including race and ethnicity, environment and society and social inequality. He has mentored a handful of UNH students through the McNair Graduate Opportunity Program, including Tobi Afolayan. Brown says one of the challenges of the project involved supervising research that was significantly different from his own scholarship but adds that he learned a lot from Tobi’s research. “It was interesting to see how the project evolved over time—both the research questions Tobi was interested in as well as the picture that started to emerge once Tobi had collected his interview data.”
Read Tobi E. Afolayan’s article Coming To America: The Social and Economic Mobility of African Immigrants in the United States >>
