Akudo McGee’s voyage to Maastricht

Akudo McGee, PhD candidate at FASoS, describes her life as at times ‘very random’, especially the story of how she ended up in Maastricht.

On top of that, she is turning into a ‘crazy cat lady’ and has given her cats special names.

A quick google search on Akudo brought me to a blog post about ‘the wackiest cat names of 2018’, and her cat was nominated. “When I was little, I really wanted a cat really badly. When one day about 20 years ago I woke up from a nap and saw that my mom had got me a cat, I was super excited. I wanted to give him a unique name and thought Banana Pawz would be funny,” Akudo explains. Unfortunately, Banana Pawz passed away in October. “I do have three more cats. One is called Whitney Houston. I rescued her from a shelter just mere hours before she would have been put to sleep, so I wanted to choose a strong and powerful name for her. Then there’s Mooie, which I just thought was a nice name. And there’s All Time What; I named him after one of my favourite songs by They Might Be Giants,” Akudo says.

Akudo was born and raised in Philadelphia. Her parents are Nigerian. “I did not enjoy living in Philadelphia. I’m a bit of a nervous person and a tad shy. In Philly you need to be tough, so the city just didn’t match my personality. When I went to college, I decided to move as far away as possible without paying out of state tuition fees, so I ended up in Pittsburgh, which was more to my liking.”

Her choice of studies in Pittsburgh seems a bit random. “As a child, I once saw a movie that was partly in German and I just fell in love with that language. I thought it was so romantic and beautiful, something like a symphony, so I decided to study German at the University of Pittsburgh. I had studied French and Spanish before but none of these languages are as pretty as German in my opinion. I also really like the Dutch language, even its ‘g’.”

Her voyage to Maastricht might be just as random. “For my master’s degree, I wanted to apply to universities in Germany but a friend of mine told me about the University of Amsterdam and that it was a good school to study European Studies. I had never heard of it before, but I decided to apply. When I was accepted to several universities in Germany and the University of Amsterdam, I made a Facebook post about not knowing which offer to accept and a friend of mine said I should really go to Amsterdam because it’s such a nice city and other friends agreed. I really had no clue, so I basically decided on the place to pursue my master’s degree based on peer pressure. It was via my thesis supervisor that I found out about a PhD position in Maastricht and I’m very happy that he geared me towards this direction!”

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