High Tech High Mesa

By the time I entered High Tech High Mesa (HTHM), I had already cycled through eight different schools. Years of traditional teaching had left me convinced that school just wasn’t for me, and I was on the verge of giving up on the whole system altogether. Yet things hadn’t always been that way. Back in Japan when I attended public elementary school, I loved learning in that environment. At that age, I didn’t think about education as a system—I simply experienced each day as an adventure. My classmates took their studies seriously, teachers blended playfulness with purpose, and I thrived: joining the school band as a percussionist, savoring delicious school lunches, and rehearsing joyfully for the music festival. Those years shaped my childhood, and it would take a long time after moving back to San Diego before I felt that same happiness in school again.

Middle school in the U.S. began at a small charter school with only 50 kids in my grade. The academic pace lagged far behind what I was used to, and many classmates seemed disengaged, treating school as a place to socialize rather than to learn. That was fall of 2019 and soon after COVID hit and everything went online, which trapped my frustrations further. Around the same time, our house flooded, forcing my family into nine months of hotels and Airbnbs while repairs were made. Navigating adolescence in quarantine—waking up only to sit in front of a laptop listening to teachers lecture a grid of black screens—left me feeling disillusioned and numb.

A turning point came a few months into this monotony when I discovered two podcasts—Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead—hosted by researcher and author Brené Brown. I was fascinated by her ability to give language to what I thought were amorphous emotions through grounded-theory research. Those conversations with scholars, authors, and thought leaders became my gateway to a broader intellectual world—one that traditional academics had never revealed to me. With my curiosity reignited, I felt like there was now a new challenge on the horizon. School remained dull, but now I had a parallel education: reading her books, exploring new disciplines, and seeing how they eloquently parsed complex ideas to get to the crux of an argument. I felt like Alice stepping into the looking glass as I had glimpsed a new world that was calling me to jump through.

By the end of 8th-grade, I had practically given up on school, so when faced with the choice of staying at my performing arts school or transferring to HTHM, I chose the latter mainly because the commute would be easier for my parents because I assumed the academics there would be no better than my previous schools. But what I underestimated was how project-based learning—and the educators it attracted—would completely transform my sense of what my future could hold.

With everyone still masked up and social-distancing, I entered my 9th-grade fine arts class not expecting much, but in that first encounter with D. Smith, I became enamored by the prospect that this was no ordinary class. We dived straight into a lesson on color theory, yet blended with his unmatched charisma, witty humor, and jaw-dropping anecdotes from a decade of teaching, it felt like stepping into a Picasso painting—unsetting at first, but once you stepped back and saw the idiosyncrasy as a whole, it was plain captivating. Then, just as I thought I'd met the best teacher I'd ever have, I walked next door and was greeted by my Humanities teacher, Matt Darling. In that first week we talked about unceded territory, community values, and glimpsed what our first project would be. Matt's story coming back into teaching is a gut-wrenching one that's intertwined with him personally, but that irrevocable history is what breathed life into his teaching and that dedication he had towards his students was infectious.

Independently, D.'s and Matt's class were distinct and brilliant in their own ways. But when the walls separating their rooms were folded away and all 60 students had their eyes on them both, an unparalleled chemistry was born as they bounced ideas off each other, changed plans in a heartbeat when something made more sense, and magically turned chaos into collaboration as we worked through our project.

What was apparent through their actions was that they genuinely cared for each and every one of us and wanted to see all of us succeed. Every decision they made in those classrooms was in service of that greater goal and not only did they love their work, they honed their craft akin to how a swordsman might sharpen their blade—with integrity, honor, and passion. It seemed like they were born to teach, and for us students, seeing them take their work seriously motivated us to reciprocate the effort and do the same.

Our project, Uncommon Message, centered around uplifting the stories of marginalized heroes throughout history. By blending principles of art and design with our analysis of redlining maps, the close-reading of obituaries, and iterative writing cycles, each group created original designs that told the story of these heroes. We then organized a pop-up market on a public street to sell screen-printed T-shirts and tote bags and to display our sculptures and writing pieces.

Our collective efforts culminated in a singular exhibition that Matt and D. masterfully facilitated at first but it was us students who carried it across the finish line. Seeing the fruits of our labor and learning that we could actualize a vision was when I finally believed that school could be something more than what I experienced before. That would be the catalyst for the rest of my high school trajectory in advancing what education could be.

From then on I became obsessed with one question: what would it take to bring the magic that I experienced with Matt and D. into every classroom? In just the second semester of 9th-grade after our classes had changed, I was disappointed to find that not every project was automatically golden. It took time for me to rethink my expectations and to reframe my frustration as an opportunity to revise the assumptions I'd made. I realized that simply operating in a project-based learning school didn't guarantee a rockstar project and I hypothesized there were underlying conditions, often intangible qualities, that impact the student experience more so than visible ones.

In trying to understand what made a learning experience transformative, I became inquisitive and at times rebellious. I'd disrupt practices that felt stagnant and wasn't afraid to vocalize my opinions. At times, my sentiment came off as brash and might've rubbed people the wrong way, but through that I had to learn how to strike a balance between advocating for what could be and acknowledging what's there. I had to stop blaming people for all their actions and recognize that decisions that might’ve felt like a personal choice were often guided by an invisible hand dictated by the larger system.

With each new project and each new teacher, it expanded the range of information I pulled from to inform my vision on what a classroom should look like. In 10th-grade math we designed and launched rockets and built a bamboo fort from scratch. At the same time I directed a modified version of The Crucible, a play about the Salem witch trials. as we drew parallels to McCarthyism, political propaganda, and modern media. And in a project that combined science and humanities, every student wrote a research paper on one environmental topic—I chose sustainable architecture—and we published an anthology of all our pieces purchasable on Amazon.

Then in my junior year we organized a fashion runway show with the entire school as our audience as we examined 100 years of American history through the lens of fashion. From the Chicano Rights and Civil Rights movement to 1970’s Disco and 3rd wave feminism, we explore how each of these groups represented their beliefs, ideologies, and spirit through what they wore. In a different class we partnered with Illumina, the biotech company, to run DNA extraction experiments, tour their campus, and have a mini-documentary filmed about our class. Later, we had a project where we organized a fundraiser for the oncology department at our local children's hospital as we learned about the science and politics surrounding cancer by hearing first-hand stories from a survivor, a bone marrow donor, and from associations like the DMV organ donor program or the Gift of Life bone marrow registry.

Over the course of four years I went on countless field trips and collaborated with dozens of community partners. Notably, we went to the San Diego Zoo and San Diego Safari park multiple times to learn about conservation efforts with White Rhinos or endangered frog species and to take a break from the routine of school life. In a project titled Lithium Valley, we learned about the degrading environmental conditions at the Salton Sea and the lithium deposits in the region as we considered stakeholder perspectives from all sides—from the lithium extraction companies, local citizens, politicians, environmental advocates, and native tribes. We used evidence from online research and on-site field work to make informed decisions on what policies and actions would be best for everyone.

Then during the last few weeks of 11th-grade, we had our month-long internship program where Matt Darling, who by then moved to the Bay Area to become a high school administrator at Summit Prep, became my mentor. I worked alongside him to understand his role in operating a school, and I facilitated an end-of-year professional development for their faculty. I also learned about the power of coding, spreadsheets, and automation to develop a script that generated their graduation ceremony slideshow along with other administrative tools.

When senior year rolled around, everyone's focus was on college applications, and with the guidance of our exceptional college counselor Chirs White, I wrote personal essays about my experiences at HTHM and about my involvement with educational change. After getting accepted into Stanford University, I decided to commit there trusting that the peers and faculty I meet will challenge and inspire me in ways that I’ll be hard pressed to find anywhere else.

It’s somewhat ironic that as someone who vocalized not wanting to attend college in defiance of its rigid structures that I ended up getting accepted into one of the most prestigious institutions in the world. While it might be convenient to attribute this accomplishment to my own actions, I recognize that although I put focus and heart into this work, so much of our wins (and failures) are not our fault. From being raised in two cultures, getting the chance to attend high school on the forefront of innovative learning, and meeting people that advocated for me, those were the privileges I had that got me to where I am. Given the advantages I had access to, I owe it now to the people who have believed in me to leap at the opportunities to create things that’ll positively impact not just me or my circle, but will lead to better outcomes for communities all across the world.

A pattern throughout my life thus far is that I’ve always swum just past the frontier of what I can do: after I aced the academic game, I wanted to understand what it takes to be a teacher; after that, how to orchestrate the whole school; and each time I grew comfortable in one pond, I dove head-first into the bigger one next to it. I imagine that I’ll continue to do the same in this next chapter of my life. I’m anchored in my vision to live in a world where the systems around us help people lead fulfilling and successful lives in the ways each of us define them and that last part is essential. Too often, people are conditioned to work for the promise of a better life ahead, only to look back and wonder if they ever lived the life they wanted. I want to flip that script. For me, it’s about setting bold goals, stepping into the world to pursue them, returning to my vision, and pushing forward again. If I keep repeating that cycle—stretching beyond what feels possible, learning from the process, and building systems that lift others along the way—I know I’ll not only reach my destination, but also create something that makes the whole journey worthwhile.