A Promising Future

For too long now we've been lamenting how, as many of our children leave Hawaii for college and graduate school on the mainland, there is the sense that they are leaving for good because our community lacks the ability to provide opportunities for all the kama'aina who would like to come home to live and work. Perhaps that's why it was so refreshing to talk recently with the son of a friend who is a junior in college and already planning to return home to Hawaii as soon as he graduates to start his career. His concern wasn't so much that there would not be job opportunities for him as it was that he would lose ground if he wasn't back home as quickly as possible.

First we talked about what he might want to do. An economics major, he was thinking about going into banking, and I told him that I thought that would be an excellent field in which to make a career in this town. He thought that he might want to pursue an MBA at some point and wondered whether interrupting his career to return to school for a couple of years, especially if it was on the mainland, was an advisable thing to do. I assured him that he would be able to make any ground that he lost by being away, and that obtaining his MBA would enhance his business career.

I had a question for him at that point: his single-minded goal of returning home to start his career was nice, but what was the hurry? Why not spend a couple of years working in New York or San Francisco? His response amazed me: He didn't think the experience he'd get working on the mainland would be significantly better than what he'd get here, but mainly he didn't believe that any other city in the country offered people as good an opportunity to make a difference in their community as Honolulu did. To him, a career wasn't simply about having a good job with great potential for upward mobility but more about creating a life that included community involvement and service as an integral part.

His dream is to see Honolulu realize its potential to become one of the great cities of Asia Pacific region, and he wants to make realizing that dream the goal of his career. The starting point, of course, is here in Honolulu, working to make it the best and most livable community in the world by preserving the local culture and environment while addressing all the other problems like housing and education. Knowing that it was a very long term project, well, that was why he was so eager to get back to get started.

He suddenly seemed a little embarrassed and apologized for gushing so much about his career plans, and he asked me if I thought it was just a pipe dream. I told him that it was indeed ambitious, but that I'd never heard a better career plan. I also told my friend that he had a helluva kid. Now we just have to get a few more like him to come home.

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