MAK’S BEST GRADUATE WAS EXPELLED TWICE IN HIGH SCHOOL

Just before he could complete his Senior Three third term examinations at Our Lady of Good Counsel SS Gayaza back in 2007, Rodney Adriko was handed an indefinite suspension over indiscipline. Consequently, he enrolled and sat his UCE at St Joseph’s Ombachi, Arua, where he scored a hardly impressive Aggregate 29. Then two years later, at the end of his Senior Five at Seeta High School, Adriko was eliminated (albeit indirectly this time round) over academic performance.
He had scored 13 points, one point short of the 14 that was the requirement for promotion to Senior Six, and was told to either repeat Senior Five or find another school. He chose the later. He joined St Peter’s SS Naalya, and scored a remarkable –but still far from stellar– 18 points in Physics, Economics, Maths and Entrepreneurship in UACE.
Yet against that background, tomorrow Adriko will stand before a row of Makerere University’s top dons and bask in the implacable honour of being named overall best student of Uganda’s oldest university at its 65th graduation ceremony. He has a CGPA of 4.88 out of a possible 5.0. And above all, it will be the crowning moment of an academic journey whose protagonist thinks is a reflection of how far a person might go by resiliently and continuously working to get better.

I couldn’t let my past ruin my future
Reflecting on his record of two expulsions, Adriko says the first lesson he picked was to never lose track of your vision no matter the challenges. He says with this in mind, the thought of giving up on school never crossed his mind. Rather, he understood that he had to work with what he had.
Adriko says he also quickly realised that you should never lose your self-belief no matter how far you fall.
“I always knew I had the ability to pass and attain my goals,” the 23-year-old says. “I had always been one of the best three students in my class throughout my time at Our Lady, as well as back in my primary school. So even when I didn’t perform so well in UCE, and even when I had to choose between repeating Senior Five and changing schools, I knew I could always pass if I worked harder. When joining university, I still believed in myself.”
Here, though, Adriko adds that it is also important to acknowledge your mistakes and work on correcting them. He says on realising his disciplinary issues after his first expulsion, he did some soul-searching and worked to be better. After his second expulsion over academic performance, he acknowledged the need to work harder in class.
I never read to the extent of denying myself a life
However, talking of working hard, Adriko says to him, the phrase has never meant reading ceaselessly to the extent of ignoring all other aspects of life. Rather, he explains it as simply taking your academics seriously by doing what is required at the right time, while also leaving time for other aspects of life –and he says this is how he was able to excel at Makerere.
“To be honest, I’m not the type who would read through every moment of time I had,” Adriko says. “Actually I was a very social person; my room in Livingstone Hall was most of the time full of colleagues going about all sorts of things –watching TV or movies, playing video games, name it. I was also quite involved in organising social events like parties and sporting events at our faculty, and I also found time to go hang out once in a while.”
The palpably confident young man here stresses that what mattered most to him was making sure he attended all classes, and that he found and perused as many reading materials as he could. Adriko reckons that unless his memory fails him, throughout his three years at university he only missed one class –and that was because he was reporting a case of theft at a police station minutes after it had taken place.

Found the learning environment favourable
However, Adriko also attributes his performance at university to a favourable learning environment and favourable learning practices, which he says allowed him both physical and intellectual room in which to excel.
Adriko says: “As you might guess from the reading habits I’ve mentioned, I’m not the type that can perform well if pushed around to do things, or if denied space to devise my own means to achieving desired results. I always prefer to be given my own space to figure out how best to revise, with a lot of time in between for me to engage in co-curricular activities as well as to rest. This I found at university, but in most of my secondary schools the situation was one of being always pushed around to do things in a particular way.”
Citing his time at Seeta High as an example, Adriko says while there he had time for neither leisure nor for enough rest. “As HSC students we would be up by 5am for morning prep, study all day and get to bed only after 11pm –after evening prep which was extended to 11pm so that we could discuss.”
Here, Adriko says actually, there is need for a change of attitude and practice for schools that overwork students thinking it is the way to excellence.

Studying what you love
Adriko mentions another issue that enabled him to finally find his feet at university as the fact that he got to study a field that he really loved. “Getting to study IT motivated me so much. From the time I was a child, I had always told people at home that I wanted to become a computer engineer when I grew up –I didn’t know the field was called IT. I remember even when applying for courses, I put only one choice of IT on my application form. The headteacherr was rather mad at me, saying what if I missed it, but I didn’t see myself studying anything else.”

Team work is also key
Adriko reckons it is no coincidence that his IT class produced both the best student as well as the biggest number of first class degrees this year.
“We worked as a team,” Adriko says. “We particularly had this thing we called Team Initiative, where TEAM stood for Together Everyone Achieves More. It was a group of more than 70 IT students, where we aimed to form a close social bond so we could excel. We regularly held discussions on what we had studied in class, we endeavoured to form social bonds through organising events like parties and sporting outings… And at the end of the day, of the 21 first class degrees in IT, 16 were from our group.”

Who is Adriko?
Born on January 2, 1992, in Arua Hospital, to Alex Onzima, the Minister of State for Local Government, and Milka Adiru.
Adriko was raised in Arua and moved to Kampala with his parents when he was two years old.
He attended Ntinda Primary School from Primary One to Primary Three and St Noah Primary School Zzana from Primary Four to Primary Seven.
Adriko interned at Uganda Revenue Authority between June and December 2013 and plans to enrol for a Masters in Cyber Security.
He currently lives off freelance work for different companies and individuals around town.