Mohammad “Mo” Agha Mohammadi will tell you straight up that Guilford College wasn’t his first choice. Not even his second. “It was my last choice,” he says, with the kind of honesty that makes you wince and laugh at the same time. His sister attended Guilford, which, in the strange logic of younger siblings everywhere, automatically disqualified the College from Mo's list.

Mo’s dream school was Virginia Military Institute, but the tuition price tag hit like a linebacker. Guilford came through with a scholarship that made the decision easy. One day he was packing for a military college in Virginia; the next he was on Friendly Avenue, realizing only after he’d arrived that he had signed up for a Quaker school.

“That part I didn’t know,” he says, grinning.

What he also didn’t know was how much the place would open him up.

Mo came from a public high school in Burlington, N.C. He says he was “the quiet kid,” the one who sat in the back, turned in homework once a week, and slipped out unnoticed. He was a member of the yearbook club, but nothing else. Didn’t play sports, didn’t hang out after class. He jokes now that he was practically a visitor in his own education.

And then there’s the part he rarely tells people: Mo is from Iran. He’s lived in North Carolina for 10 years, but he usually dodges the question and says he’s from Burlington.

Why? He shrugs. Some of it is avoiding the assumptions people sometimes make. Some of it is homesickness. “It’s something I’m trying to put behind me,” he says quietly.

So when he showed up at Guilford, he carried all that with him — the introversion, the distance, the sense of being an outsider, twice over.

But small campuses have a funny way of not letting you disappear. At Guilford, Mo kept bumping into the same faces. People waved. People talked. People asked him to join them. He walked across campus and found himself in conversations he hadn’t planned, friendships he didn’t see coming.

“People here are very open to talk about stuff,” he says. “It was easy to make friends. Easier than I expected.”

He’s still very much an introvert, but his friends are changing that. “Sometimes it’s easy to feel like an outsider,” he admits. “Especially if you’re from a different country. Having people who want to hang out with you just … it makes a lot of difference.”

It did more than that. It changed him.

The kid who once slipped into the back row now has multiple campus jobs. He’s the student people recognize walking across the quad. “Sometimes people call my name,” he says, “and I’m like … do I know you?”

Mo arrived at Guilford knowing he wanted to study computers. He comes from a family of Biology majors, including his sister, Fatemeh Agha Mohammadi ’21. Mo thought he’d follow his family, but the whole Biology thing didn’t fit. Coding did. He took up Python in high school. The programming language made sense in a way nothing else had. “It’s logical,” he says.

So he declared Computer Science. Then Cyber Network Security. Then both.

The student with two majors says there are two Guilfords — the one where you learn about your passion in the classroom and the one you learn about yourself outside class.

“Guilford taught me humility,” he says — not the fainthearted kind, but the kind you learn when theory meets reality. “Class helps you find the answers. But you have to go out and get the experience.”

Mo is a member of Guilford’s Honors Program. These days he’s busy working on his Honors Program thesis project. After helping build an AI robot that can detect and pick up trash on a beach, he’s designing an emergency-response drone capable of delivering medical supplies, food, and water to people in hard-to-reach or disaster-stricken areas.

He’s also doing some traveling. Last year a professor nudged Mo to compete in hackathons and capture the flag computing events at nearby colleges. Every time, Mo arrived unsure. Every time, he left with more. Enough, eventually, that he won a competition at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill – his first major recognition, earned alongside teammates he’d just met. Not bad for a kid who once avoided raising his hand.

He’s eyeing graduate school now. Maybe the military, which could help him secure the security clearance he needs to eventually work in cyber defense for federal agencies. “I believe in myself,” he says. “I’m such a different person that I was three years ago. I found so many opportunities here and I’m glad I took advantage of them.

Mo found something else — something harder to define but easy to see in the way he talks now. “I like the person I’ve become,” he says.

Did Mo find the right college in Guilford? “Absolutely,” he says. “It’s been so good for me.”

Not bad for Mo and Guilford – even if it wasn’t first on his list.