Her Story
About Motunrayo
I am a data analyst at Parent to and through partnerships, an education nonprofit where I have been working for about seven and a half months. My main areas of expertise are data strategy, data analysis, and continuous improvement, and for the past two and a half years, I have been synthesizing data primarily in the education sector. Before this role, I worked in higher education at the University of Texas at Tyler with the graduate school as a coordinator, where I focused on retention and persistence initiatives for UT Tyler graduate students. One of my most notable achievements was being able to launch the online onboarding platform for the graduate school at UT Tyler - supporting the build, implementation, and putting that out there for grad students coming in. It was well received by the graduate student population, which I am very proud of. Before I moved to the United States, I was in Nigeria where I worked in strategy and corporate finance. I hold a bachelor's degree in psychology from Redeemers University in Nigeria (2016) and a master's in tech/industrial management from the University of Texas at Tyler (2023).
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Motunrayo
01What do you attribute your success to?
Honestly, first thing, my upbringing - not just family-wise, but the country that I grew up in. In Nigeria, you have to have grit to survive. You have to be determined to not take no for an answer. And also to be able to pivot, because I've done a lot of pivoting in my career. So yeah, just having grit, knowing that if you're somewhere, you're meant to be there. I attribute most of that to where I grew up.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
It is very broad. It looks like a one-page book when you're looking from the outside in, and sometimes it can feel like, what exactly am I doing here? Do they need people like me here, do they need my kind of expertise here? Especially people in areas like STEM and engineering, but there's space for everybody. If you feel like, you know, my place is not the classroom, you're definitely needed somewhere else. It could be in advocacy, it could be in data, like the work that I'm doing, it could be in strategy. It could be in anything, but there's space for everybody in education, and we definitely need the help. So yeah, I guess to not think too much about whether or not you're needed, to know that you're definitely needed, and you can find a place in it.
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