Couple master graduate school, family life

Graduating on Saturday alongside hundreds of University of Hawaii at Manoa students will be especially gratifying for husband and wife Jason and Kekai Smith, who managed to blend their full-time schooling with parenting the past few years, raising three young children while attending graduate school on scholarships.

Jason Smith, who is graduating with a master’s degree in social work, and Kekai Smith, who is getting her master’s in civil engineering, admit the past few years have been trying at times but credit their faith and each other for their perseverance.

"We’re real big advocates for people wanting to or thinking about school who don’t think they’re quite up to the task. You can do it," Jason Smith, 32, said.

For them, attending classes was a family affair. The couple would commute to the Manoa campus from their Laie home with the whole family in tow: daughters Nanea, 4, and Hali‘a, 2, and 9-month-old son Tairawhiti.

"We haven’t done the regular, you know, drop the kids off at a baby sitter’s or day care and go," said Kekai Smith, who turns 30 on Sunday. "That wasn’t what it was about for us."

The routine would go like this: "He’d drop me off to my class, and he would be in the car with the kids and go get a snack or go to a playground. Then when I’m finished with my class, we drop him off to class and hang around or visit cousins. And when he’s finished we all go home."

The couple would often start their one-hour commute in the early morning to secure a parking spot close to school, then prepare for classes using a flashlight while the babies slept.

"Our whole college experience, it’s been a journey for our whole family," Jason Smith said.

The drives to and from school provided quality time for the couple and the family. "Some of our favorite times were those rides. We’re going to miss it," Kekai Smith said.

The Smiths say they’ve learned to live simply and let their faith (they’re active members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) help guide their decision making and put things in perspective.

School wasn’t cheap: Resident graduate tuition for the 2014-15 academic year at Manoa was $13,250 a year for full-time students.

The couple rent a small studio — Jason Smith jokes it’s "a little bigger than our van" — on the North Shore and have relied on postsecondary scholarships through Kame­ha­meha Schools and tuition waivers through UH-Manoa’s Kua­ana Native Hawaiian Student Development Services to support themselves.

"We didn’t have an income. We basically lived off of scholarships," Jason Smith said. He’s had part-time jobs here and there, but the paychecks amounted to "pennies."

"We’re the richest poor people that we know. But we’re also the happiest," he said matter-of-factly. "We live on the beach. What’s so bad about that?" Kekai Smith added.

Kekai Smith, a Kame­ha­meha Schools alumna, initially attended Pepperdine University on a volleyball scholarship before meeting her future husband on Oahu. Jason Smith, whose mom is from Hawaii, moved here from New Zealand and enrolled at Brigham Young University-Hawaii "to buy me more time on the island to surf."

After getting married two years later in New Zealand in 2009, the couple had planned to move to Cali­for­nia for Kekai Smith to finish her studies.

"We flew back to Oahu on what was intended as a stopover on the way to Cali­for­nia, but we never got on that plane," Jason Smith said.

The two completed their undergraduate degrees — Kekai Smith at UH-Manoa and Jason Smith at BYU-Hawaii — before setting their sights on graduate school.

"We’ve kind of done this journey quietly, just chugging along by ourselves," he said. "But when people do hear about us, they say, ‘Wow, that’s kind of big.’"

While the Smiths prefer to keep a low profile, their experience at UH hasn’t gone unnoticed.

"Those two are just amazing. It’s like they must have a special formula to be able to have three babies, two of them in school, driving all that way, and still producing their papers and projects," said adviser Kuu­mea­aloha Gomes, director of the Kua­ana program at UH-Manoa. "It’s been very inspiring to watch them go through everything that they went through."

The Kuaana program’s services include need-based tuition waivers for full-time Manoa students of Hawaiian ancestry. Graduate students need to maintain at least a 3.0 grade-point average to qualify for assistance.

Gomes said she’s been most impressed with the Smiths’ resilience. She described them as "dynamic and powerful yet very soft people."

"The fact that they were starting their family and they continued to focus on their academic goals at the same time — nothing could stop them from doing what they had to, and they were always so happy," Gomes said. "Oftentimes they looked harried, but they were always focused and they never, ever asked for any special accommodations."

The Smiths say they’re still deciding where the future will take them now that school is over.

"We’d like to be able to say where we’ll be in a couple of months, but we actually don’t know ourselves," Kekai Smith said. "We look in the direction that we know we want to go and know that as long as we continue doing what is right, we continue to get blessed."

For now they are excited to be able to celebrate their accomplishments together Saturday — unlike their undergraduate ceremonies, when they had to Skype each other.

"This time," Jason Smith said, "we’ll be in the same place at the same time."