Black Excellence: Nicholas Johnson Makes History as Princeton University’s First Black Valedictorian

Nicholas Johnson is our ancestors’ wildest dreams.

Johnson is an operations research and financial engineering major from Montreal, Canada, and he’s the university’s first Black valedictorian.

During his time at the prestigious school, Johson studied abroad at Peru, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom. Last Summer, he interned at Google’s California headquarters as a software engineer in machine learning.

Johnson is gearing up to get his Ph.D. next Fall, but before that, he plans to spend the summer interning as a hybrid quantitative researcher and software developer at the D. E. Shaw Group

Nicholas Johnson says he thanks a lot of his success to his tribe. “My favorite memories of my time at Princeton are memories of time spent with close friends and classmates engaging in stimulating discussions — often late at night — about our beliefs, the cultures and environments in which we were raised, the state of the world, and how we plan on contributing positively to it in our own unique way.”

Princeton University is a private Ivy League school and was founded in 1746, and this is the first time a Black student is graduating with the highest honor. Ain’t that bout a b*tch.