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In this episode, I’m chatting with Precious Kolawole, who moved from Nigeria to Canada through the Shopify Dev Degree program, and has also seen her TEDx talk “How coding can change your life-and the world” go viral.
There’s a trap that awaits most immigrants. It’s subtle, and it sounds like self-awareness: Maybe they won’t pick me because of my accent. Maybe I don’t belong here. Maybe I should expect less.
Precious knows this too well. She describes sitting before a performance review at Shopify, telling herself to calm down, preparing for disappointment despite knowing she’d worked harder than anyone. When her supervisors told her she’d earned the highest rating, she screamed on the call. They paused, confused. Why this reaction? Because she’d already decided she wouldn’t get it. “It’s very funny how we think,” she says. “We think too much. We’re immigrants.”
But what makes Precious different is how she reorients herself. She traces it back to coding, specifically, to debugging. When you debug code, errors are problems that always have a solution, that’s if you’re willing to keep looking.
And that mindset has carried into how she approaches her immigration journey in Canada.
Precious and I dig into:
Leaving behind a medical degree, a Microsoft Nigeria offer, and communities she founded
How her family stays connected across four countries through mandatory Sunday calls
Why Canada’s talent visa puts power in employers’ hands, and what that costs the country
The Nobel Prize effect and the danger of letting success make you comfortable
Dozie’s Notes
A few things that stuck with me as I listened through this week’s conversation:
Chase knowledge, not settlement. Precious has refused to let the pursuit of documents override her pursuit of growth. If the best AI-in-medicine program is in the United States, she’ll go there. Settlement will come eventually, she says, but knowledge has a narrower window. I think it’s an easier ask when you are young. but one still worth thinking about.
Canada’s talent visa puts power in the wrong hands. The Global Talent Stream is employer-initiated, that is the company decides if you’re talented, and you’re tied to them. America’s EB1 lets the individual apply based on their own accomplishments. If Canada wants to keep people like Precious, the above distinction matters. As Daniel Bernhard argued in his episode, we need to view immigration through an outcome-based lens, and stemming the loss of talent to countries with better structures is a measurable outcome.
Official Links
✅ Connect with Precious Kolawole on LinkedIn
✅ Watch her viral TEDx talk
One Ask
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