Meet Olamikun Ogunleye of The Teen Med Magazine

Today we’d like to introduce you to Olamikun Ogunleye.

Hi Olamikun, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I founded Teen Med Magazine, which publishes health and medical writing made by teenagers and young professionals. It started small, I had one article I wanted published somewhere and couldn’t find a publication like this that was actually active, so I built one instead.
It’s grown past anything I expected going in. We have readers in over twenty countries now, the US is our biggest audience, India is second, and the UK actually overtook India in the last month, which I’ve been watching happen in real time. Our writers have shifted too, it used to be mostly classmates and personal contacts, and now we regularly get undergraduate and graduate researchers finding the magazine and submitting pieces about their own research, making the case for why teenagers specifically should care about it.
Day-to-day, I’m still the one who edits and posts every article to our Instagram myself. I built templates for each of our article categories a while back, which sounds minor, but it’s cut down the time that used to take significantly, and it’s stayed one of the parts of running this I genuinely look forward to.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Not smooth always.
The first time, I was hospitalized with malaria over a summer in Pennsylvania, right around when my brother was moving into college. It went undiagnosed for a couple of days, tested for COVID, tested for the flu, before anyone figured out what it actually was. I was treated at CHOP and started to feel better after that.
Then a few weeks into starting at my new school, EF Academy in New York, I got sick again. This time it took over a week of bouncing between the school nurse, urgent care, and a medical center before anyone took it seriously: at different points I was told it was a stomach bug, then possibly appendicitis. By that weekend, I remember resting in the nurse’s office in so much pain, feeling completely worn down and a bit abandoned, and calling my dad, close to tears, just asking to be taken back to urgent care. It wasn’t until my second or third visit back to the medical center that anyone finally diagnosed it correctly, malaria again, and admitted me. I guess the first time it wasn’t fully treated.
Once I was actually hospitalised, the doctors and nurses were unbelievably kind, checking in constantly, making sure I felt looked after. But there was a genuinely scary moment where they told me my blood levels had dropped low enough that I might need a transfusion and had me sign the paperwork for it, with my parents thousands of miles away and me handling all of it alone. Thankfully it never dropped further and the transfusion wasn’t needed. But that week taught me something that’s stuck with me since, how to function and keep making decisions even when you’re scared and completely on your own. Teens have experiences like this everyday, and Teen Med Magazine also serves as a channel to share their experiences and what they learned.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Most of our work produced in health-writing comes from lived experience or genuine curiosity. Our writers connect medicine to things you wouldn’t expect going in, I’ll start reading a submission about relationships or music, and by the middle of it there’s a genuinely sharp connection to biology or neuroscience I didn’t see coming. That crossover is probably my favourite thing the magazine produces.
Teen Med Magazine has never been monetized, and I don’t think it needs to be to work. Every writer, every ambassador, everyone on the team does this because it interests them, not because there’s money involved, and I think that’s part of why the writing stays genuinely curious instead of feeling like an assignment.
Actually, one of the weirdest experiences I’ve had running this magazine was with one specific article. One of our writers, Rachelle Henrietta Fajar, wrote a piece on déjà vu. While I was reviewing her draft, I read the first few lines and saw the cover image she’d picked and got hit with total certainty I’d read the exact article before. I went digging through our entire archive three separate times convinced it was a duplicate submission. It wasn’t. It had never existed before. I sat there experiencing déjà vu while reading an article about déjà vu, in real time. Isn’t that just insane?

What makes you happy?
Balancing all of this with a full IBDP course load, standardised testing, college applications, and everything else I’m committed to hasn’t been easy, but it’s made me genuinely efficient with time in a way I don’t think I would have learned otherwise. I do still take breaks, and piano is where most of them go: I’ve played for a few years, I’m at grade 8 level now, and this summer I worked through Chopin’s Minute Waltz, the first movement of Mozart’s K332, and Schubert’s Impromptu No. 2. So you can probably imagine that I often need time to reset my brain, and making Instagram posts for the magazine is one of the ways I do, especially in a week that’s usually full of decisions about other people’s writing. I’ve done it so many times I don’t even have to use my brain. I just turn some music on and relax as my fingers start editing. It’s the one part of my week where nothing needs to grow or scale, and that’s exactly why it makes me happy.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.teenmedmagazine.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/teenmedmagazine/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/olamikunogunleye/