It’s easy to dismiss the last three semesters at Yale as a flicker of drunken sidequests, chicken tender Thursdays, and crippling 4:30 p.m. sunsets. But as I write this piece, I accept that it was instead a dragged and painful period of self discovery that extinguished an anxiety I penned in my common app as a senior in high school. My essay begged an answer to the question:what the hell am I to do with my life as a student straddling the worlds of STEM, the arts, and multiracial identities being Native and Asian? I admit I am terrible with time management, but this unsettlement has nothing to do with a task that many of us struggle to deal with. Yes, college is yet another journey of finding meaning and belonging at a place like Yale, filled with questions that we’re always asking like “where and with whom will I feel the most comfortable spending time with?” or “What sort of things will I put my time and bandwidth into?”  But this journey was distinct, not marred by feelings of exclusion or solitude. In fact, my social interactions were fulfilling and were instrumental in finding myself here, reinforcing the sincerity behind the oft-repeated sentiment that people ‘choose Yale for the community.’ Settling into  intersectionality, though conventionally told and retold as a modern moment of pride, truly subjected me to all sorts of self-conflict and pressure, affecting my fundamental state of being. In the shadow of my identity’s multiplicity, I felt deeply hopeless and unhappy with where my life was going.

In the prolonged, hot summer right after Camp Yale, like your typical first year, I floated around campus for the first few weeks of classes. On week 3 or 4, though, my suitemate, Koby Chen, asked on our suite group chat for volunteers to go with him to the AACC for their welcome back mixers, featuring their affiliated clubs. Cheery voices and beautiful, happy faces manning way too much food from Basil, and many mingling first years presented so many opportunities to connect and weave myself into this group of people. Upperclassmen like Ava Estachio-Touhey and Mark Chung would continue to serve as role models to this day to the baby frosh like me and Koby, inspiring enthusiasm and savviness about leading in events that  made me feel at home in the spaces that the AACC and organizations like Asian-ish and KASAMA. Just being in the periphery of an affiliate organization greatly helped me actively participate in how I embrace being Asian. 

 At the time, I was getting ready to join the herd of pre-med students as an MB&B major, while frantically managing monthly piano lessons in Boston at the New England Conservatory. Not only hadn’t I realized the work and conviction necessary to excel in both areas of study, but I also lacked the motivation to keep up with such a logistically challenging schedule. Pre-med and piano lessons in Boston could not be more distant—both geographically and in practice. There was no way to relate biophysics with music in a way that assured, yes, this is what I would love to study for a significant part of my life while maintaining some form of financial stability.

I evoke a core pre-NACC transitioning to NACC memory: In chemistry and biology lectures, I would see Native friends finding their seats in the class with lamps or staplers in-hand – a rather unconventional game of ‘assissins’ was being played, and seeing the commitment to the bit for more than three weeks (congrats to form NISAY president Mara Guiterez on winning) was something that stuck with me. As I continued my exclusive involvement in the AACC, the NACC activities like the assassins and even the halloween party, of which I heard was really funny, were part of many quirky forms of a more intimate engagement at the NACC that stuck out to me– I usually never experience FOMO, but there was some broad and overarching form of it that once again felt like the concealment from a shadow. In these snippets of time, I longed to connect with my Samoan heritage, especially growing up in a household where my culture was largely absent.

All while this was happening, my relationships between people and my personal interests like music and stem struggled and vied for some form of agreement until I met the most unlikely group of people that would help me realize something out of  this hopeless situation––CS Majors. Ron Cheng, one of my closest friends at Yale thus far, showed me that computer science isn’t just on shallow and contested grounds a form of selling out, but that it was a tool that could allow me to find lines of work in life that I could combine with music. Cheng, along with one of my closest friends from high school who is also a CS major here, Emma Slagle, were both amazing artists themselves  who even pushed me to realize that pursuing a degree in Computing and the Arts would be the degree to shoot for for the next three years that could check off all of the boxes.

In the summer where I began my a trialing to see how CS would fit my skillsets––hours of Leetcode and online classes recommended by friends––two more crucial events happened. My peer liaison to the NACC, Kala’i Anderson, who would organize Sunday brunches between me and basically all of “the Hawai’i kids”, who were his PLees,  recommended that I apply for a house staff position at the NACC. I bothered Dean Makomenaw almost every day in the middle of July to meet on Zoom or respond to my emails to get me on the roster last minute. I watched the movie “Boy,” by Taika Waititi, one night, and the soundtrack of the Polynesian choir fed such a visceral feeling into me that would not only affirm but make myself subscribe to the journey of finding ways to use my education to connect back with family in Samoa and Hawai’i. 

Sophomore year entered the stage right on its cue and I was fortunate to begin taking lessons with my supportive teacher Elizabeth Parisot at the school of music while I started to find a new family at the NACC. Josh Ching and Connor Arakaki, even MORE friends from Hawai’i along with Kala’i, Emma, and basically the entire PL group, showed me how funny and personable Yale Natives can truly be. We were carving out spaces together in Mikiala Ng, Josh, and Brandon Haruki’s newly founded “students of the Indigenous Peoples of Oceania” with viciously ambitious schedules that would meet with Pasifika leaders and contributors from all over the world. My most proud contribution, having coordinated and directed a benefit concert for those affected by the Lahaina wildfires that would raise over 3 thousand dollars to the Maui Strong Fund, rang all the right bells in my head and kept on affirming my role in the core communities I’m involved in. I cried a little while I witnessed Sudler Hall get filled to its capacity, and still think of that day as one of the all-time highlights at Yale. Today, I still very much engage in affairs at the AACC, where I am so proud to see new first-years like Marissa Halagao lead and navigate stories in indigeneity and identity similar to mine. 

These new turns in how my identities in Indigeneity, Music, and STEM, worked together and convalesced into the dawning on the fact that I –a newly christened CPAR major– could explore many quirky and intersectional ways to celebrate and engage in conversations with multiple communities all while being able to pursue a stable career that could support my parents. A motivation to continue working with people and having the kinds of honest conversations with myself and others about what community is was very important to finding this sense of “settlement” and peace within myself. Being fortunate to meet the right people at the right time and in the right place is one thing, but being willing to continue working past this by saving yourself from complacency in an unfulfilled position is something that students that overcome crippling effects of balancing intersectionality must endure.