A Grandfather’s Footsteps, A Continent’s Story: How Melissa Akita Made Her Mark At Cambridge Judge

Author: Marc Ethier, Editor-in-Chief at Poets&Quants

Following her grandfather to Cambridge, Melissa Akita wins pitch money, co-chairs an Africa conference and finds a family. 

When Melissa Akita weighed her MBA options, Cambridge Judge Business School offered something no other school could: a family connection. Her grandfather came to Cambridge in 1945. 

“Cambridge offered a lot,” Akita says. “It’s one year. It’s also international. And my grandpa came here in 1945, so it also had a deep family connection for me.” 

The school’s name carries weight back home in Ghana, she says, and Cambridge’s entrepreneurial ecosystem sealed the deal. Akita wrote in her application essay that she wanted to compete in the college pitch contests, and she did. She says she pitched at the Queens’ College entrepreneurship competition and won £5,000 in funding, then reached the finals of a climate challenge. 

A CONTINENT ON THE AGENDA 

Akita arrived determined to bring more African voices into the room. Working with the MBA team last December, she helped host an application guidance session that drew more than 100 prospective students. The payoff has since arrived in person. While she was heading to do laundry at Wolfson College, a Kenyan woman she had coached called out her name. The woman is now studying there on the same Wolfson scholarship Akita holds. Then, at King’s Cross, a Nigerian man she had advised stopped her, and he has since won a Navarino scholarship. “Seeing them in real life is very exciting,” Akita says. 

Then came the Cambridge Africa Business Conference, which Akita co-chaired. Speakers and sponsors traveled from Tanzania, Rwanda and across the continent, including NMB Bank CEO Ruth Zaipuna, who delivered a keynote on transforming banking in Tanzania. The program tackled capital, innovation and pan-African scale, and classmates told Akita they hadn’t realized how much was happening across the continent. She says she learned to delegate and spot talent along the way, handing sponsorship to teammates who raised a lot of funds. 

“There’s a perception of risk on the African continent,” Akita says. “That narrative needs to change, and we are the ones who change it.” 

HOME AT WOLFSON 

“Wolfson became my home,” Akita says. “You get your friends in the MBA, and then you also have the tribe back at Wolfson.” 

The diverse college welcomes students each Monday with a free Manifest Monday breakfast, where Akita planned her week and chatted with Ph.D. students from other disciplines – once , memorably, about Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. There is a weekly writing day, formal dinners, and a club room with a bar. 

The feeling of joining something began almost immediately, in the first week. A classmate invited the whole cohort to her parents’ home for an Indian meal, and Akita, who had never tasted Indian food, went.  

“That was just how Cambridge became like family to me,” Akita says. Before long she was returning the favor, hosting classmates for jollof rice and games in a gathering she called Jollof Dates with Melissa. 

MORE THAN A DEGREE 

Akita isn’t leaving Cambridge just yet. After submitting her final reports, she is staying on through a two-month extension of her summer internship at the Centre for Global Equality. Along the way, she even learned to ride a bike. 

From the outside, the MBA can look like nonstop fun, she agrees, with programs, parties, and travel filling her WhatsApp status. But insiders know better. 

“To outsiders, it feels like you’re always having fun,” Akita says. “But if you’re an insider, you know it is as much work as it is fun.”