Rachael Benjamin Igbeka
DATABASE ADMINISTRATOR → IT EDUCATOR
My father was an architect. Long before I understood what that meant, I understood what it looked like — he built things, and I wanted to be near it. As a child, I would rather go to a construction site with him than go to school. Some mornings were a full negotiation: fussing, fighting, even faking sickness, all to spend the day watching him work and building my own tiny structures out of whatever I could find. He never made me feel silly for it. Looking back, I think he was quietly teaching me to build.
He came from very little and built a life and a career for himself before he passed away in 2001. I was in Primary 2 — roughly Year 3 in the UK school system, around seven years old. I didn't have the words for it then, but he had already given me something that outlasted him: a hunger to learn and to make things.
What followed wasn't the path I'd have chosen for myself. Between 2010 and 2015, I studied Industrial Microbiology at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri (FUTO) in Nigeria, graduating with a BSc in Microbiology. It was my mother's choice more than mine — she hoped I'd become a nurse or a doctor in the US — and for five years I studied a subject I had no real pull toward. I spent most of it feeling like I was standing slightly outside my own life.
Things started to shift during my National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) year, 2016–2017 — Nigeria's mandatory year of service for university graduates. Away from the structure of a course I hadn't chosen, I started finding my way back to what I'd always loved: teaching, knowledge, building, designing, documenting. That search led me to IT.
My first real step into the field came in 2018, as a Database Administrator at Babban Gona. It wasn't a straight line to get there, and it didn't need to be. I'm sharing this story because I know what it feels like to be stuck, unsure, or grieving something — a parent, a plan, a version of yourself — and to wonder if it's too late to start again. It isn't. You can start your dream today, at whatever age or stage you're at, and this site — and I — are here to help however I can.
My goal now is simple: help people who are genuinely interested in IT figure out how to begin. That's what the rest of this site is for — and it's why I'd like to hear from you directly, too.