Chimaobi O. Amutah

Chimaobi O. Amutah ’07 says that he came to Cambridge with the attitude, “Harvard isn’t going to change me.” Wearing bandannas and jerseys, he would exit Thayer and look up and down the yard like he was in “the ’hood.” Now, Amutah sports simpler garb as he heads to class or Boston as part of the Mission Hill After School Program, which he helps coordinate.

“Not dressing like that doesn’t mean that you still don’t rep that neighborhood,” says the social activist and blogger. “It’s just that you’re becoming an adult.”

“Chimaobi acts scary but he’s really a big-ass teddy bear,” says friend Andrew H. Golis ’06. “He is not nearly as intimidating as some would have him be.” In fact, Amutah has his softer side: he is a TeaLuxe devotee and adores his mother’s farina, a traditional Nigerian dish.

He arrived at Harvard hoping to become an entertainment lawyer, but shifted gears to pursue advocacy and social change, increasingly conscious of his Trenton, N.J. roots. He switched concentrations from English to African studies, and developed an affinity for Marx.

Amutah criticizes Harvard students who realize that their career choices will have an adverse effect on society, but “don’t care enough to change [them].”

“A lot of people don’t have exposure to the people that they are going to be adversely impacting,” he says. “I do have exposure.”

The summer before his junior year, Amutah met Golis, a fellow First-year Urban Program leader. Golis suggested that Amutah join the staff of Cambridge Common, the lefty Harvard blog Golis founded in 2005.

“He is considerably more radical than I am,” Golis says. “He is willing to tell everyone else to screw off if he doesn’t agree with them. That’s pretty admirable I think.”

Amutah’s career-changing moment came on a PBHA trip to Mississippi. Now, he will pursue a Masters of Education degree at the University of Mississippi while teaching in the Delta for the Mississippi Teacher Corps­—a far cry from entertainment law.

He hopes to someday return to Trenton and his alma mater, Trenton Central High School. Amutah has learned that he wants to put his Harvard education to beneficial use. His advice to like-minded individuals?

“What you can do is devalue the fact that you went to Harvard.”