The Email I Almost Deleted
By Oluwaseyi Ayodeji, Published on oluwaseyiayodeji.com | Sovereign Stack Newsletter
I almost missed the email that changed my life. It sat in my spam folder for weeks.
I was flying back from a session at T/PgM College - part of the GCL University ecosystem I lead inside Google, where we're trying to upskill talent fast enough to keep pace with what AI is doing to the shape of work. Somewhere over the country, my mind wandered backward, the way it does when you're staring out a window with nothing else to occupy it. I ended up in Brussels, in 2012, in a story I haven't told in full. And by the time we landed, I understood something I want to hand to you before life moves on without you noticing: nobody arrives anywhere alone. Every "next level" you're chasing right now is sitting behind a person you haven't thanked yet, or a person you'll never get the chance to.
Here's the story.
The email I almost deleted
In 2012, I was a master's student in materials engineering at New Mexico Tech, in Socorro - about as far from a global career fair as you can get. A friend, Tunji, finishing up his own master's at Ole Miss, mentioned an MIT European career fair almost in passing. He'd applied the year before, made it through several rounds, and didn't get the internship. I'd never heard of the fair. I applied anyway, mostly because he'd mentioned it, and then forgot about it entirely.
Months later, emails started arriving from someone I didn't recognize. I assumed it was nothing - recruiting spam, a mismatched list. Most of them went to my spam folder and stayed there. She kept writing. Before the career fair and during it, she kept writing.
When I finally opened one and read it properly, I realized she was a recruiting manager from Procter & Gamble Europe, trying to get me in front of her for an interview. She assumed, reasonably, that I was in Boston for the fair like everyone else on her list. I wasn't. I was in Socorro, on a graduate stipend that moved between six hundred and a thousand dollars a month. A flight to Boston was $760 - money I did not have and could not find.
I told her so, fully expecting that to be the end of it. Instead, she rearranged the entire process around a graduate student she had never met: a virtual interview, then a written exam proctored in Albuquerque. I sat the exam in a testing center in New Mexico, passed it, went through the remaining rounds, and was offered the internship. Belgium was a coin flip among a few country options - no strategy, no reason. Just Brussels.
I open with this part of the story on purpose. It's the part most people skip when they tell their own version of "how I got here." We remember the offer. We forget the recruiter who kept emailing a student who wasn't answering. Diane didn't owe me that persistence. She gave it anyway, and an entire decade of my career sits downstream of that decision.
Getting there was its own education
Saying yes meant unwinding a small mountain of logistics, starting with my graduate advisor, who was unambiguously unhappy. His students worked through the summer on research. Mine was about to fly to Belgium instead. He made his disapproval known, and I went anyway - a decision I'd remake the same way today, though I understood even then there would be a cost to pay on the other side of it.
The more pressing problem was my F-1 visa, set to expire, which meant I needed to renew it at a U.S. embassy outside the country before I could fly anywhere. Mexico was the only renewal option I could actually afford - Canada and Nigeria were both out of reach on a graduate stipend. A friend in the same situation and I found a guide in El Paso to take us across the border into Juárez, where the embassy was. We crossed the border, past border patrol agents, through a city that was, at the time, dealing with real drug-related violence. We got our visas renewed. We also got mistaken, memorably, for celebrities by a group of high school girls in a mall who wanted photos with us - ten seconds of accidental stardom neither of us has let the other forget.
I tell this part not because it's essential to the lesson, but because it's true to how these stories actually work: the path to the opportunity is rarely a straight line, and the people who show up on the detours - a friend willing to navigate a foreign border with you - matter as much as the ones waiting at the destination.
Brussels, and the people who made it home
I landed in Brussels in May 2012 and was in the office the next day. My intern guide, Filip Vangeel, made the transition easy in a way I didn't fully appreciate until much later - the quiet work of making someone feel like they belong somewhere new. Filip reported to Rafael, a sharp, direct French leader who gave me the first genuinely difficult feedback of my career. It stung. It was also the first time someone respected me enough to tell me the truth instead of managing my feelings, and I've tried to operate that way ever since.
The internship cohort was its own gift - interns from Egypt, Turkey, the U.S., Italy, Spain, Ireland, Greece, France, Poland, Hungary and Nigeria, all of us figuring out a new city together. We turned everything into an event, including laundry day at the apartment-hotel we shared on Avenue de la Toison d'Or. There was a trip to Paris, a missed trip to Amsterdam I still regret, an aperitif or a dinner that somehow happened most nights. One mentor, Stefano, could never quite pronounce my name and landed on "Sergi" instead - and somehow it stuck so thoroughly that "Call Me Maybe" became "Call Me Sergi" for the rest of the summer. I still smile every time that song plays.
These are small things. They're also the things I remember twelve years later with more clarity than most of the actual work I did that summer, which tells you something about which one mattered more.
The reason underneath all of it
My mother had been diagnosed with ALS before I left Nigeria for graduate school in August 2010. By 2012, two years had passed without me seeing her - not from neglect, but from arithmetic. A graduate stipend doesn't leave room for international flights, which is the same reason Boston had been out of reach a few months earlier.
The internship paid considerably more than my graduate assistantship. I took the opportunity, and the income, and used it to fly home before returning to finish my degree. Seeing her was the hardest thing I've written into this story. She was gaunt in a way I wasn't prepared for, no matter how much I'd braced myself. I think we both understood, without saying it, that this would be the last time. I said goodbye and flew back to the U.S. to finish what I'd started, carrying the kind of dread that doesn't leave - waiting for a phone call you know is coming. My mother passed away in January 2014, from complications of her illness.
My advisor was still upset that I'd gone to Belgium instead of staying for summer research, and when I came back to finish my degree, he was reluctant to release me - it took real effort to get there. I eventually did, and went on to spend five years at Intel. None of that happens without a friend's offhand comment about a career fair, a recruiter who refused to let a missed email be the end of the story, a mentor who made a new country feel survivable, and a mother whose illness gave the entire trip its real weight and urgency.
What I want you to take from this
It is extraordinarily easy to let your life happen to you without noticing who is making it happen. The friend who mentions the opportunity in passing. The recruiter who emails you four times before you finally read it. The manager who tells you the truth when it would be easier not to. The parent whose limited time left quietly reorders your priorities, whether you realize it in the moment or only years later.
None of us arrive anywhere by ourselves. The relationships placed in your path right now - the ones that feel ordinary, the ones you haven't called back, the ones you assume will still be there next year - are very likely the difference between where you are and where you're trying to go. You don't usually get to know which ones in advance.
Look around. Whoever is standing near you right now might be your Diane, your Filip, your Tunji. Treat them like it.
