By Jake Kailahi, SAA 2020
Two years just like that. Two years and my email signature will read M dot A dot. Two years’ worth of projects like FAR, Student Stories, GAP, OCP. Two full years’ worth of laughs, cries, smiles and frowns. Two years of managing graduate coursework, assistantships, jobs, working with students, familial and personal relationships at a distance. And to think, it was only two years. In just two years all of us were able to accomplish so much.
For me, I always must ground who I am and where I am from to know where I’m going. If I know that progress is a by product rather than a result. Ko hono ‘elito ‘oku tanaki ia – Its core is gathered.
I am Jake Kailahi-Knowles
I am Afakasi
I am motivated, yet lost
I am prominent, but not pronounced
I am the mirrored image of a faint memory
I am of strength, course, and handicraft
I am a humbled heart and unsatisfied brain
I am Faiako and Tama ako
I am a catalyst
I sit here thinking about why I enter a master’s program like this and who I was doing it for. I obviously acknowledge that I did it for myself, but more so I realize I did it for others. It’s not that I had some ambiguous family pressure to go to graduate school, to be honest my family thought I was going to be a heavy equipment driver let alone go to college. I say this to acknowledge that as we put on our master’s hood on, we need to come face to face with some major realities about our future, at least mine. First, we are no longer the students in a traditional sense, it’s not about us (it never really was). I entered a program like this to help those like me, who came up how I came up. To help people, not because a hood and an ambiguously profound title say we can, but because we must. Second, don’t think you know or need to know everything now that we have a master’s degree. Just stay committed, smile and lean on your life’s “why”. Why are you doing what you’re doing. Being honest with yourself, but you don’t need to be hard on yourself. Getting yourself figured out doesn’t have to mean you got it figured out. Finally, I want to say briefly congratulations to the SAA MA Class of 2020, you don’t have to prove anything to anyone, you all have accomplished so much and will continue to do great things.