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I fell in love with carpentry when I started working with my family in my junior year of high school. We did side jobs together and from then on, I wanted to be a carpenter. I took the classes offered in high school and thought, why not take it in college too? When I graduated I went straight to KCC and haven’t stopped working since. I just like seeing the buildings come up from the ground. When you frame up a building and see it start coming together, it’s hard to explain how good it feels!

We come in to class and it’s just like working a real job, we get there on time and get to work. My first semester, we built concrete steps on campus. We started with math, calculating how much concrete we needed to fill the slabs. Then we tested our calculations in the workshop and finally put it to use. I love that even with the bookwork, I get to apply what I study in real life. After we finish our calculations we check our angles and shot points with a transit to make sure we got it right!

We also help our community — we replaced old wooden steps at St. Theresa’s with safer concrete steps. We put up shelves inside a storage room on the campus, and we helped pour a concrete slab for a kapuna.

I love driving around the island and seeing structures and buildings and going “Wow, I worked on that. I did that!” I love getting good remarks about what I do.

I’m working towards my degree at KCC, and then I plan to join the carpenter’s union and build new buildings on my island home. I’m even working side jobs to pay for my tuition right now, using what I’ve learned in class. I know that I’ll be prepared and ready to work the second they hand me my diploma at graduation, and that’s such a great feeling!