Watch out world, here comes Eniola Badejo
Eniola Badejo, a fourth-year entertainment and media studies and marketing double major, has taken advantage of unique opportunities to explore majors and campus resources, helping him discover the profession he wants to pursue while also making an impact through student organizations and involvement.
His outreach and service endeavors center on impacting communities of all types. What’s also been unique is the connection between service, marketing, technology, and even the impact on cultural communities, which have been at the center of all that he does.
Badejo was the 2023 Georgia Poet Laureate’s Prize Winner, an accomplishment that came about through perseverance and trusting in his own creative voice.
“I love expressing myself. I love the friction of trying to figure out how to say something in a unique way,” Badejo said. “I think the friction is the point, and I think it teaches you a lot of lessons about real life; about how sometimes the friction and the journey to arriving at the end point is the most important thing.”
Badejo has been able to bring that introspection prevalent in the writing process to his other roles throughout campus as Project Manager of UGA Marriage Pact, a matchmaking website connecting UGA students with each other.
“Running Marriage Pact, it was never the point of the end goal of whenever everyone matches,” Badejo said. “It’s that fun in-between of everyone getting excited: ‘who’s my match going to be’ and everyone’s talking about it with each other, and everyone’s buzzing with excitement.”
Connecting his work in poetry to the work in running the UGA Marriage Pact, Badejo said, “The poem isn’t more important than the experience of making the poem. So, in the same way, gearing up for the launch and end of Marriage Pact was just as important as Match Day.”
Badejo has accomplished some amazing things as a student, scholar, and community member, with his journey in student service beginning in an unexpected way.
“I was student body president in high school, and so I declared I would never do student government again,” Badejo said. “Then, I remember encountering issues that I wanted to fix on campus, realizing that I didn’t have a medium through which I could do that because I wasn’t in student government.”
Badejo joined UGA’s Student Government Association shortly after, serving as Director of Campus Services his sophomore year, a role which he has stayed in for a while, working on the Auxiliary Services Student Partners Committee.
“I’ve gotten to meet some really awesome people, and I’ve gotten to deepen and establish relationships with people I would have never interacted with on my side of campus,” Badejo said.
One experience that acts as a highlight for Badejo is hosting the Backlight Student Film Festival, a two-day student short film festival that’s occurred at the University of Georgia since 2021.
“Hosting the Backlight Student Film Festival has to be one of the greatest honors of my collegiate experience, because it really emphasized for me how much I love getting to work on something that feels so much bigger than me – I didn’t feel like a cog in the machine, but I definitely felt like a component of something bigger,” Badejo said. “This group of people working with this big goal of hosting a festival to celebrate student film, and you have all these filmmakers who got to show off their films in a place that they wouldn’t have been able to; in a place that’s history, Morton Theater. And we did it for them. We did it for the audience.”
Overall, Badejo sees immense value in working in storytelling and the humanities, citing the interplay of passion, aspiration and opportunity as a launchpad to thrive creatively.
Looking into the future, Eniola Badejo looks back on both his interpersonal and professional experience at UGA and its students with great fondness. From studying abroad at Oxford after freshman year to being the 2025 New Ideas Competition Grand Prize Winner for Duke’s Fuqua School of Business – the first UGA student to do so – Badejo has aimed to make the most out of his college experience.
What’s next for Eniola Badejo as he heads into his senior year?
Well, over this summer he’ll be spending time in New York City as an NBCUniversal strategy intern and participating in Harvard’s Summer Venture Management Program learning invaluable insight as a business school student. As he continues his academic journey, Badejo has a goal that he’s been gearing up to achieve before he graduates.
“I’ve always wanted to be in a play,” Badejo said. “I’m excited to meet people through it. I love when the ensemble comes out after the show and they bow, and you can just see the romance and joy.”
Badejo says that this aspiration comes because of his work across different areas.
“Working with Marriage Pact or being on the SGA campus service team – all of it has to do with community. Community is what I look for and, being in a play, I’m just trying to build a little community and make a show,” Badejo said, seeing stories as the backbone of community. “You can’t extract community from storytelling and vice versa.”
As Eniola Badejo enters his fourth year at UGA, he won’t be entering it alone. By his side are the lifelong friends, mentors and peers he has found, finding a home in fixtures like SGA and Backlight. Whether it’s the journey of writing a poem or the journey of a student who could’ve never imagined such a vibrant and uplifting community, the work being done in professional and social settings is not done alone, nor is it meant for one person. It is, as Eniola would say, “for the people!”
Writer/Contact: Elijah King, 706-542-3564, askstudentaffairs@uga.edu
