Education Access
The tutor who spends his hours looking up
Tchouantieu Nzokou Ulrich tutors his peers through the week, photographs the sky, and on Saturdays turns what he sees into stories and speeches; the tutoring has grown into an initiative he founded, the Academic Excellence Hub.
On Saturdays he sits down at his typing pad. "I take all the reflections and sit down at my typing pad to turn them into action," Tchouantieu Nzokou Ulrich says. He writes long-form creative stories and sometimes motivational speeches, centred on youth sensitization, personal development and moral lessons.
The rest of the week is for tutoring. He is a graduate of La Prudence Bilingual College Yaounde, having passed his GCE Advanced Level exams in August 2026, and his focus is on tutoring peers and breaking down complex academic concepts. "I actually think demistifying difficult subjects is my vocation," he says. Academic concepts always came easily to him growing up, he says, and classmates approached him for help until tutoring became a daily routine. That routine has since grown into the Academic Excellence Hub, an initiative he founded for peer tutoring, academic support and student leadership.
“For me, observing the sky is where reflection happens.”
Tchouantieu Nzokou Ulrich
For the 2026 to 2027 academic year the Hub has taken on a new cohort of students to mentor. It has also widened what it does: beyond tutoring, it now advocates for high school students in Cameroon and connects them to educational and youth opportunities, local and global, so they can build their profiles, gain experience and reach milestones of their own despite what he calls local resource limitations.
The tutoring came at a cost. "For a long time, I didn't have any time for myself; I gave all my energy to others and kept none for my own well-being," he says. To step away from that pressure he started taking long walks, and nature, he says, gradually became his therapy. "On some days, I would even speak to the sky as if I were speaking to a real person."
He calls himself a dedicated Uranophile. He spends hours looking up, photographing the sky. It began because he could not visit the same places every day, so he started capturing them, in photos and short clips of different areas and the changing sky. Now, whenever he feels overwhelmed, he looks back at those photos. "What started as amateur photography has truly blossomed into a form of art," he says.
He does not have a professional digital camera. His phone remains a primary tool, though he has recently acquired a new laptop to power the tutoring, the writing and the leadership work. He is, he says, "doing the absolute best I can with the limited means I have."