A polytechnic graduate’s email to a newspaper columnist in 2009 began a seven-year academic journey that ended with a doctorate in information security.
In November 2009, a recent graduate of the Federal Polytechnic, Bauchi, read a newspaper column about studying in the United States and sent the author an email. His question was a practical one, and one that many Nigerian polytechnic graduates have asked: would an American university treat a Higher National Diploma (HND) as the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree?
The graduate was Ibrahim Waziri Jr. Almost seven years later, he held a PhD in information security from Purdue University. Today, he is a foremost cybersecurity expert and a former security product leader at Microsoft and Google.
Born in America, raised in Bauchi
Waziri was born in the United States and grew up in Bauchi, in northern Nigeria, according to a 2019 profile in Daily Trust. He speaks Hausa and English. In 2009, he completed an HND in electronics engineering at the Federal Polytechnic, Bauchi.
His professional profile says that during the National Youth Service Corps year that followed, in 2010 and 2011, he worked as a network security engineer in the IT office of a federal neuropsychiatric hospital.
An email and a column
The column that prompted his email was by Farooq Kperogi, a Nigerian columnist based in Atlanta who wrote regularly about studying in America. Kperogi replied, and later published a step-by-step guide for HND holders.
Waziri described what came next in a first-person account that Kperogi published in September 2016. He sent his Ordinary National Diploma (OND) and HND transcripts to World Education Services, a credential evaluator, which assessed the HND as equivalent to a U.S. bachelor’s degree. He took the Graduate Record Examination and applied to three Georgia institutions: Georgia Tech, Southern Polytechnic State University, and Georgia Southern University. Georgia Southern accepted him.
Kperogi wrote that he had forgotten the exchange until Waziri emailed, roughly two years later, to say he had enrolled. Waziri also visited Kperogi at home.
Georgia Southern
Waziri began his master’s degree in August 2012. In his own account, it was a Master of Science in applied engineering with a focus on information technology; the university’s alumni association lists it as an M.S. in information technology in the Allen E. Paulson College of Engineering and Computing.
He worked as a research and teaching assistant to Professor Jordan Shropshire, now at the University of South Alabama. The projects concerned network security and cloud computing and produced Waziri’s first academic publication. The work was part of a National Science Foundation-funded project on detecting compromised hypervisors in cloud infrastructure, and he built the OpenStack test environments it used.
Shropshire, in a recommendation on Waziri’s LinkedIn profile that Kperogi reproduced, called him his best graduate assistant. Waziri was inducted into the Phi Kappa Phi honour society and graduated in May 2014.
A doctorate in two years
He started a PhD in information security at Purdue in August 2014. His research areas were network security, cloud computing and virtualization security, and his profile mentions penetration testing of cloud firewalls.
By his own account, he took more courses each semester than required and worked on his dissertation alongside them, finishing about 90 credit hours of coursework and the dissertation in two years. He noted that doctoral programmes in the United States commonly take at least four years. He graduated in August 2016; Kperogi wrote that he did so with high honours.
While at Purdue, he worked as a cyber anti-fraud analyst for RSA, the security division of EMC, and in 2015 interned as a cybersecurity analyst at the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington, D.C. His profile lists the College of Technology’s Daniel and Martina Lewis Graduate Assistantship Award for 2015. That November, he presented a paper on phishing and website forgery, “Website Forgery: Understanding Phishing Attacks and Nontechnical Countermeasures,” at the IEEE International Conference on Cyber Security and Cloud Computing.
A story that travelled
Kperogi ran Waziri’s account in his Daily Trust on Saturday column and on his blog in September 2016. Waziri was 29 and working as a security research engineer in Washington. The following week, Kperogi wrote a further column on how Nigeria regards polytechnic qualifications.
The story resurfaced in October 2019, when Daily Trust published a profile by M. D. Aminu. Aminu used it to ask a wider question: whether a Nigerian public university would admit an HND holder to a master’s programme without extra hurdles. He noted that HND graduates in Nigeria are commonly advised to complete a postgraduate diploma first.
In his 2016 account, Waziri wrote that he still thought of himself as a student and that he hoped eventually to return to Nigeria to work on its cybersecurity problems. He has remained based in the United States for his career, but has written on Nigerian cybersecurity policy since at least 2017 and joined a Nigerian federal health-data committee in 2024.
Away from work, Waziri describes himself on GitHub as a dad and a “gearhead.”
