During her final year of study, Deborah took on an important leadership role at her university, which came as a result of her looking through her course’s first-year core modules and realising that the number of diverse philosophers (women, BAME and those who had anything remotely to do with diverse topics) in comparison to European philosophers was an alarmingly low 12 per cent. She conducted a survey to ask students their opinions and most were not even aware that they weren’t studying certain topics.

“This rang alarm bells with senior management,” she says. “I approached my senior tutor, who also happens to be the university’s head of the philosophy. He spoke to the associate professor of politics and she was also able to identify the same issues.”

The three decided to work together to further research these issues with the aim of improving things. First, they acquired funding for the project via Students of Change, an on-campus programme which funds projects that aim to push positive change.

As we went to print, Deborah was set to have a meeting with the University’s Dean to pitch the findings with the hope that changes will be implemented.

Deborah was recently one of 190 students, and the first ever from the University of Nottingham, to be accepted on to the prestigious pre-MBA program at Harvard University. Here she will spent evenings analysing real business cases and use morning study groups and classes to examine and debate ideas.

She was previously also accepted on to the undergraduate business conference organised by Princeton University, where she was one of 133 delegates and just one of three UK delegates, from an application pool of more than 4,000, for the all-expenses paid conference in New York.

Additionally, over the summer Deborah won a competition held by Job Today UK – an employment networking application company – to submit an interesting and viable business idea. She pitched her business Campus Cookoff, the first online visual platform for black university students to express themselves through their culinary skills – think Master Chef with an urban twist! Her prize was a one-on-one mentoring sessions with Jamal Edwards MBE, entrepreneur and founder of the online urban music platform SB.TV.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

With Campus Cookoff being the biggest show on Netflix and having an impact investment fund in Nigeria.