This past week, I interviewed Mrs. Etikerentse to ask her some questions about her childhood, life, and how she likes Magnet. It was very interesting to hear about growing up in another country and how she has lived in several places in the world. 

Mrs. Etikerentse was born and grew up in Lagos, Nigeria. Lagos is a megacity in Nigeria and one of the country’s commercial capitals. Her father was very successful in the oil industry, one of Nigeria’s largest exports, and was the most successful in his family. So even though Mrs’ Etikerentse was only one of two kids, she always had many of her cousins and aunts or uncles staying at her house so it made her childhood very lively and busy. 

Mrs. Etikerentse went to a very prestigious secondary school in Nigeria called Queens College. It was an all girls school that was run by the federal government. In Nigeria, you must test into all schools and Queens College was one of the hardest to get into and only accepted the most high-achieving girls. Her mother, grandmother, aunts, and sister had all gone there in former years. After secondary school, Mrs. Etikerentse was sent to boarding school in England. This was an all girls Catholic school in the southeastern part of England.  Nigerian families sending their children to boarding schools in other countries is very normal and was the customary thing to do. Mrs. Etikerentse then completed her undergraduate and received her Bachelor of Science in Development Economics at the University of London. Development Economics is the study of the economies of developing countries. Then when she moved to Charlotte, NC she found that there were no jobs for this major in the US and decided to move into the IT field because of the large IT boom occurring in the US at the time. To do this, she completed a graduate degree in Managers of Information Technology. Later on she achieved her Masters in Public Administration and then later received her teaching degree.

Mrs. Etikerentse did not plan on coming to the US until she met her husband in Charlotte, North Carolina. She was on vacation visiting her cousin while  in school in London. It was quite the coincidence that she met him because he had moved to Charlotte just that week;  he even had gone to the same school as her cousin in Nigeria. They had a long-distance relationship while Mrs. Etikerentse finished school and then she also moved to Charlotte.

When Mrs. Etikerentse first moved to Charlotte she  did not have a green card  so she decided to go back to school and get her degree in IT. After living in Charlotte for a while and going to school and working in IT, she found that she did not really enjoy it. She then moved to South Carolina with her husband. While she was working for the Community Foundation in downtown Charleston, she went back to school to get her Masters in Public Administration.  Her husband invested  heavily in real estate during the housing bubble and since Mrs. Etikerentse didn’t have a job at the time she took the opportunity to become a real estate agent and did very well for a while until the market declined in 2007-2008. She later became a substitute teacher and then a teacher at Charleston Day school. She moved to Virginia and taught at a school there and then she came back here to teach all of us!

Mrs. Etikerentse never thought that she was going to become a teacher. She first thought that she would work for the Ford Foundation in Nigeria. The Ford Foundation gives grants to organizations around the world and she thought this was what she wanted to do so that was why she went into development economics. She had many other jobs in between, as listed above, but one day her friend recommended to her that she try substitute teaching. Mrs. Etikerentse did, and she loved it. She even used to substitute teach for Magnet years ago. She went back to school and got her teaching degree and started working at Charleston Day. After that she  taught seniors AP classes at a school in Virginia and then last year took the job to come back to Charleston and teach Social Studies and Economics classes at Magnet.  When asked about her coming to AMHS she said, “It was a very smooth transition because of the phenomenal administration, phenomenal colleagues, and phenomenal students, so everything was very good”.

Mrs. Etikerentse visits her family in Nigeria, but is always very busy here with family and school so she doesn’t have a lot of time to miss it. Her parents live there and she usually visits them annually (without COVID). Her parents often visit here, as do her cousins that live in England as well as many of her other family members.

Mrs. Etikerentse’s husband is a doctor and they has five children: she has a son who is a junior at Michigan State, a son who is a freshman at UC San Diego, a daughter who is a sophomore at Magnet, and then a 4th and 6th grader who both go to Christ-Our-King. She is very busy with her kids and the rest of her family but they love to travel and have visited many parts of Europe, Asia, and South America, as well as of course Nigeria. She said that her favorite place that she has visited so far was Peru.

It was very nice talking to Mrs. Etikerentse and I hope I helped give everyone a little bit of a backstory on Mrs. Etikerentse’s very interesting and eventful life!