Shudufhadzo Musida on the hardest two years of her life, and the graduation moment she shared with her grandfather’s name and her mother’s smile.
Katlego Sekhu
Shudufhadzo Musida recently sat down with My Top 10 at 10 with Tbose for an honest conversation about her journey from Miss SA to Columbia University, and everything in between that nobody saw on.
At 18, she started an application to Columbia University and abandoned it. She was a Limpopo girl and it felt out of reach. She kept the letter in her mother’s house.
Years later, she was the one applying for her master’s degree. Columbia was the only school she applied to. When the acceptance email arrived at 5am, she could barely believe what she was reading.
Walking across the graduation stage felt like, in her words, “the most expensive six seconds of my life.” But what stopped her in that moment wasn’t the degree. It was her grandfather’s name.
“The Musida name is now on Ivy League stages. Barack Obama has walked here. Warren Buffett has walked here. And now it’s my grandfather’s name, Musida, on those stages.”
Her mother, who had her at 19 and raised her alone, was right there watching. “I’ve never seen her smile that big.”
Getting to that stage, though, was anything but glamorous. She was doing a master’s in international finance and economic policy at one of the most demanding schools in the world, alone in a foreign city, in temperatures that dropped to minus 11 degrees Celsius.
“Every time I’d walk, my favourite word became the F word.”
She took vitamin D supplements to cope with the New York winter. She brought her medicine from South Africa because getting sick alone with no one to bring you soup was not an option. She didn’t finish her first ever exam at Columbia because she hadn’t slept.
A professor told her early on that he would rather she slept than studied the whole night. She didn’t understand it until the cold and the exhaustion made it impossible to ignore.
“No one will ever really truly know how hard it was for me to walk across that stage. But to know that God has been with me every single second just made it all worth it.”
To hear the full interview, listen to the podcast.
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