Ahmed Muhammad is set to make history at Oakland Technical High School by becoming their first Black male valedictorian.
The 18-year-old straight-A’s student has obtained an impressive GPA of 4.73. Also, he received a score of 1540 on the SAT with a perfect 800 in the math section and a 740 in the evidence-based reading and writing section. Not to mention he’s a key player on his varsity basketball team. Yet the teen was still shocked to find that in the school’s over 100-year history he is the first Black male graduating with this honor.
“I’m really surprised that there hasn’t been a Black male valedictorian before,” Muhammad told KPIX 5 in San Francisco last month. Not only will he be leaving the school with high honor, but he has also been accepted into eleven of the most prestigious institutions in the country, including Howard, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, and the University of Southern California.
“I would have been happy to get accepted into just one of them because you know you can only go to one school,” the teen said humbly. “But eleven of them — that’s pretty cool.” Muhammad has not decided where he wants to continue his education but has hopes to study engineering after weighing his options over the past few years.
“The first thing that I ever wanted to be was an archeologist and a paleontologist. Like I wanted to dig up dinosaur bones,” he said. “Then I wanted to be an astronaut and go to the moon. Then I wanted to be a surgeon. And now I say I want to be an engineer.”
Aside from a stellar academic career, Muhammad is also the founder of his own company, Kits Cubed. The high school senior was inspired to create the science-based company after his niece and nephew disclosed that they were “bad at” science.
“I think Amir is like 6 or 7, and Ilah, I think she just made 9. Whenever I babysit them, we do things like play chess, play video games, read books or watch TV, or whatever. When I tried to do science with them, they were like, ‘No, I hate science. I’m bad at it.'” Muhammad told Atlanta Black Star in January.
“It sucked because I wanted to know why their confidence had been destroyed already at such a young age,” Muhammad added. After doing some online research, he was able to create experiments for the children. “The materials consisted of just stuff we have around the house, and they loved it,” he revealed.
The budding entrepreneur says he hopes to “engage and ignite every child’s scientific imagination” with his kits. He has already sold or donated 10,000 kits of his design and counting, each equipped with three science projects or experiments of his creation.
Muhammad joins a list of Oakland Technical High School’s most notable alumni, including actor Rockmond Dunbar; Lloyd Noel Ferguson, the first Black person to earn a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley; and Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton.
