University Communications & Marketing

Chaminade University Welcomes Jeff Scofield as Dean of Financial Aid

March 29, 2021

Chaminade University has named Jeff R. Scofield as Dean of Financial Aid, where he will oversee operations of the financial aid office. He brings more than 30 years of experience to the position.

“We’re excited to welcome Jeff to the Silversword team,” said Dr. Lynn Babington, president of Chaminade University. “His expertise will prove invaluable as he leads our experienced team of financial aid professionals in helping to guide students and their families through our many scholarships and financial aid opportunities available.”

Scofield most recently served as Assistant Vice President, Student Financial Services for Seattle University. Prior to that, he was Director of Financial Aid at University of Hawaii at Hilo. He also held financial aid positions with Longwood University in Virginia, Our Lady of the Lake University in Texas and Schreiner College in Texas.

Active in professional organizations, Scofield is a member off the Pacific Financial Aid Association, National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, Western Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators and The College Board. He received his master’s degree in higher education administration from the University of Texas at San Antonio and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Coe College in Iowa.

Chaminade University’s Financial Aid Office offers numerous financial aid opportunities, including merit aid, scholarships, grants, federal loans, alternative loans and federal work study. For the 2020-2021 academic year, 97 percent of undergraduate students received some form of financial aid; more than $15.8 million was awarded in undergraduate aid; and an average of $15,340 in grants and scholarships was awarded to each student.

To learn more about Chaminade’s financial aid program, visit Chaminade.edu/financial-aid.

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Chaminade University of Honolulu provides a collaborative and innovative learning environment that prepares graduate and undergraduate students for life, service and successful careers. Established in 1955, the university is guided by its Catholic, Marianist and liberal arts educational traditions, which include a commitment to serving the Native Hawaiian population. Chaminade offers an inclusive setting where students, faculty and staff collectively pursue a more just and peaceful society.

Finding Solutions Through Data Science

March 20, 2021

Dairian Balai ’22 peers into data to find solutions. That’s where she found her passion, too.

The Data Science major likes to say that all those numbers—on everything from community health disparities to poverty to race and education—represent people, with hopes and dreams, just like her. She’s on a mission to tell their story (and hers) by spotlighting the data that speaks to real experiences.

“I want to shine a light on the problems we’re facing,” she said.

And even though she hasn’t yet graduated, Balai is already making her mark. Thanks to a series of programs at Chaminade, Balai scored a paid remote internship with a University of Texas lab to research maternal and infant mortality and co-morbidities in Native Hawaiian communities.

She hopes to use data science to spotlight what factors can help protect moms and babies.

Balai grew up in Waiʻanae and graduated from Waiʻanae High. During her junior and senior year, she applied to a long list of potential universities in Hawaii and on the mainland. And she was pretty set on going out-of-state for her undergraduate education. But then her high school counselor told her about the Hoʻoulu STEM Scholarship, which covers 100% of Chaminade tuition and offers support services.

The scholarship convinced Balai to take a tour of Chaminade—and she’s glad she did.

“Off the bat, I liked how it was a small community. The campus was small,” she said, adding that she later spoke to her high school adviser and realized that the financial support offered through the Hoʻoulu STEM Scholarship far outweighed other aid universities on the mainland were offering her.

“I decided to stay. If I went back in time, I would make that decision again,” she said.

Balai said the thing she appreciates most about Chaminade is the one-on-one support she gets from professors and advisers, who have connected her with key opportunities. “They really make it a point to help you plan out your future,” she said. “They say ‘Chaminade is a family.’ I really believe that.”

Balai originally majored in Biology because she planned to go into healthcare.

But the course of her studies changed after she was participated in Chaminade’s Supporting Pacific Indigenous Computing Excellence (SPICE) program. The intensive, immersion experience, in partnership with the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin, is designed to help train students to lead in data science and visualization efforts that support social justice projects in Hawaiʻi.

Balai said she learned coding in the SPICE program and worked with other students to create visualizations that helped illustrate her research area—how socio-economic status impacts healthcare.

From the SPICE program, Balai participated in a Computing4Change event in Chicago. The national competition challenges students to use computing for positive social change. Balai said through SPICE and the Computing4Change conference, she learned that data science wasn’t just about highlighting problems “but helping to solve them.” That, she realized, was the career she wanted to pursue.

So Balai switched majors to Data Science, taking the plunge even though it meant a little more time completing her undergraduate degree. She also started considering how she could eventually bring Data Science home—back to Waianae and the community she loves and eventually wants to serve.

She said Data Science helped her understand that having vulnerable populations doesn’t define Waiʻanae (and other communities with larger concentrations of low- and moderate-income families), but that socio-economic and other factors have a significant impact on the lives of Waianae residents.

She is especially interested in uncovering the factors that contribute to health disparities in her hometown. Data Science solutions to those gaps, she said, will help build a healthier community. And ultimately, that will help build a healthier state and nation, Balai added.

In 2019, Balai was offered a paid internship studying maternal health in Native Hawaiians. She said as a Native Hawaiian, the research feels personal—and all the more important given the healthcare challenges the community faces. She’s continuing that work and hopes to build on it.

In fact, Balai is now planning to go to graduate school.

She’s working with her adviser weekly to consider programs, and on crafting her long-term dream: returning to Waiʻanae to “build a better, a more aware community”—with Data Science.

Returning Home to Chaminade

March 19, 2021

Dr. Lupita Ruiz-Jones, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science at Chaminade University, wants students to plan their careers with intention, so they end up doing work they love.

The key, she says, is pursuing and doing the things you are interested in, even when you don’t know where they will lead. After all, that’s what worked for her.

She was in high school in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when she learned about Chaminade University at a college fair. “I don’t think I ever would have heard of Chaminade except for that booth.”

She wanted to study human impacts on the environment, and she wanted to move away from the desert. Chaminade offered a major in environmental studies, and she was sold.

Seeking out opportunities and going after them has been a life-long pattern for Ruiz-Jones. It’s especially impressive when you learn she was raised by parents who didn’t complete college in a family without the trappings of success.

Her mother was always supportive but struggled with bipolar disorder. Ruiz-Jones’ father went to prison when she was 12, which she says had a significant impact on her. “I really appreciated the ability to choose where I put my attention,” she says.

In one of her first classes, Dr. Gail Grabowsky, now dean of the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, told the students it was great they were there. “She told us, ‘You’re going to love what you do, you’ll make an impact, but you’re not going to become rich.’”

“That was fine with me,” says Ruiz-Jones. “I felt like as long as I loved what I did and made an impact, that was what was important to me.”

During her freshman year, she applied and was selected for a five-week summer program in India. “The goal of that trip was to see what small non-profits were doing in India,” she says. “It was really about human well-being and the different ways people were contributing by doing service to the really poor. It was an incredible experience.”

But the summer after her sophomore year at Chaminade, she started doing undergraduate research at Kewalo Marine Lab. That’s where she first got excited about biology and organisms in coral reefs.

Dr. Lupita Ruiz-Jones, professor and alumna

At the end of her summer research at Kewalo Marine Lab, her advisor Dr. Mike Hadfield invited her to continue there in an internship. He also encouraged her to take all the science courses she could, which pushed her into a fifth year of college.

She didn’t mind, though, because she wanted to participate in a Sea Education Association summer-at-sea sailing program that focused on environmental studies. She spent four weeks sailing from Hawai‘i to San Francisco on a tall ship sailboat.

“Wow, that was a really powerful experience,” she says. “We did biological oceanography research. I focused my project on invertebrates that live on the surface out in the middle of the ocean.”

After graduating from Stanford University with her PhD, she received the Thinking Matters Teaching Fellowship and spent four years team-teaching there. That, she says, is where she developed her identity as a teacher and her love for teaching.

During the summers, she started collaborating with scientists at the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology.

That’s how she ended up back at Chaminade, as an assistant professor this time, in Fall 2020.

Right now, she says, her goals are to find ways to integrate her passion for research, coral reef ecology, and restoration into her teaching. And she’d love to take students on field trips to neighbor islands or other Pacific islands. “If we could do something like that where we took students to more remote Pacific Islands for environmental education, that’d be very cool.”

New Doctorate of Education Trains Leaders for Adaptation and Change

March 12, 2021

Professionals who are ready to step onto that highest rung of the educational ladder and earn a doctoral degree have a new online option.

Chaminade University’s new Doctorate of Education (EdD) in Organizational Leadership for Adaptation and Change is for working professionals in industries such as education, business and healthcare. The 60-credit program is being offered for the first time starting in July.

Dr. Dale Fryxell (dean, School of Education and Behavioral Sciences) standing in classroom

“We developed this program to meet the needs of busy, active, working adults who have careers and families,” says Dr. Dale Fryxell, Dean of the School of Education and Behavioral Sciences. “An online program lets them fit school into their schedules because they can do the coursework on their own time. It just gives people so much more flexibility. It’s a more efficient way for busy people to get a degree and improve their opportunities as a professional.”

A Doctorate in Education helps people build an impressive skill set and advance their careers. It also generally means a higher pay level.

According to Chaminade President Dr. Lynn Babington, leadership is both an art and a science, and she says the new EdD program has a strong foundation in both.

“Here at Chaminade, we believe that transformational leaders are not born that way but are developed,” she says. “To that end, we designed our new, online EdD program to prepare students to become inspirational leaders who are extremely skilled at adapting to changing conditions and new variables while also motivating people and communities.”

That focus on adaptation and change is one factor that sets Chaminade’s new program apart from other EdD in Organizational Leadership programs. “Educating for adaptation and change” is one of the essential Marianist principles that guide Chaminade University in all its decision-making.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the importance of pivoting and finding creative solutions, being skilled at working with adaptation and change has always been critical in organizational leadership and always will be.

EdD for educators, business professionals and leaders of indigenous-serving organizations

Chaminade’s new EdD program prepares students in organizational transformation for success, growth and positive impact in one of three concentrations—educational leadership, indigenous leadership or organization development.

The educational leadership track primarily targets experienced education professionals—teachers and administrators—who want to develop their leadership skills and advance in their careers. Fryxell says there are many career paths for those with a doctorate in education, including going into post-secondary education and becoming a professor or moving into administrative positions at K-12 or higher education schools. Others may become director of a religious organization or school or move up to a district- or state-level education position.

The educational leadership concentration helps develop action-oriented leaders who are well-equipped to lead person-centered learning communities and promote social justice and positive change. Courses specific to this track include Leadership for Educational Administrators, and School Community Relations.

The indigenous leadership concentration focuses on preparing leaders, especially Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, who work in indigenous cultural organizations.

Fryxell points out there are different indigenous leadership styles and approaches to leading people. A positive aspect of this concentration is what he calls “cross-pollination,” or sharing how different cultural groups approach leadership or create pathways.

Specific courses in the track include Indigenous Leadership and Organizational Management, and Power, Politics and Policy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.

There is also an indigenous leaders speakers series, which students in any of the concentrations can attend to learn from indigenous leaders around the world.

Fryxell says it’s common for people on the U.S. mainland to follow the third track, an EdD in organization development, after earning an MBA.

“That’s what a lot of MBAs do,” he says. “They lead organizations. This program is an opportunity for them to focus even more on developing leadership skills, looking at and using data for decision-making and learning how to streamline their organization and make it more effective.”

The organization development track provides an interdisciplinary approach for professionals in the business, healthcare, nonprofit and public sectors who want to drive positive change and transform their organization for success.

Many nurses get an EdD in organization development, says Fryxell, and use that as a springboard into teaching at the college level. This concentration also attracts training and development managers, human resources personnel, nonprofit directors and high-level management staff. Its track-specific courses include Leading Organizational Change, and Consulting Skills.

Mentorship and real-world problem solving

Program directors will work closely with each student, looking at their career goals and aspirations and helping them plan their path through the doctorate.

Professor teaching online to her students

The fact that the new student-centered Chaminade EdD program is 100 percent online does not constrain its emphasis on mentorship. The program is designed to foster mentor relationships that promote personal growth, critical thinking and robust dialogue. In addition to working online with professors, students are also welcome to meet with them in-person on campus.

Every dissertation committee, chaired by the EdD director, will also consist of a faculty member and someone from the community. “For example, if a student is going to do their dissertation on, say, DOE leadership, they might ask an assistant superintendent to be on their dissertation committee; somebody that’s working in the field and really knows the field to help them through that process,” says Fryxell.

“Then they also have the faculty member who’s going to help them with the academic rigor, the writing process, and the dissertation development process,” he says. “And then the chair, the EdD director, who will shepherd them through the entire dissertation process, keeping them motivated and on target so they can get that dissertation done and finish up the program.”

He says a goal of the EdD program is for students to identify a real-world problem or issue that their organization—whether it’s a school, business or indigenous organization—is currently facing and turn that into a research project. They will determine the problem, come up with a testable hypothesis, research data about the problem and develop a solution. That allows them to come up with innovative solutions in a real-world setting.

“As they go along in leadership positions throughout their careers, they will have to make decisions,” he says. “And looking at an action research process will help them be good users of previous knowledge and data to take their organizations to where they want to lead them.”

All dissertation work happens as part of a student’s coursework, and students can finish the entire EdD program in 36 months.

Fryxell says the program is an excellent opportunity for anyone looking to further his or her career and also advance themself as a person.

“I think they’ll be able to take what they learn in this program and make positive changes in everything they do. I think it’s going to be a great program and have a big impact, not only on our students but also on the community and Hawai‘i and across the Pacific.”

Networking and collaboration for resilient leadership

Throughout the EdD program, students will be able to participate in enrichment activities. A virtual brown bag series, for instance, will feature leaders who speak on various topics.

Virtual professional practice writing circles will break classes into small groups that can work together on their writing. “A lot of doctoral work involves writing,” says Fryxell, “and this way students can bounce their ideas and papers off their classmates.”

He stresses the importance of students supporting each other, discussing each other’s ideas, and being resources for each other.

“A lot of being successful throughout a career has to do with networking and your ability to form and keep relationships, so we’re hoping this program will really enhance that,” he says.

An EdD student organization will allow students to coordinate social or community service events, whether in-person when possible or else online. “We’re expecting there will be students from the mainland and from throughout the Pacific, but there will be various ways for them to connect.”

An annual Research Symposium will provide opportunities to participate in local and national conferences, offering more opportunities for students to meet, interact and support one another.

Educating the whole person

While the academics at Chaminade are innovative, modern and up-to-date, it’s never only about academics. A central Chaminade principle, built into every academic program, is to educate the whole person.

“To be a well-rounded person and a good leader,” says Fryxell, “you have to have psychological strength, intellectual strength and certainly moral strength. You have to take care of your body through exercise and diet. With all our programs, we try to help people remember it’s not about any one area of your life. It’s really about improving all areas of your life in order to be a better, more effective person.”

The school’s professors, themselves leaders and experts in their field and the community, aim to develop future leaders who lead with open minds and understanding in their hearts, are part of the solution, and make a difference in their community. Ideally, students not only move their careers forward but also become changemakers.

A Chaminade education is also about values and ethics, including social justice. That’s one of Chaminade’s defined values—educating for service, justice and peace—and it’s an important focus of the EdD program.

“The need for social justice is infused throughout our whole program,” he says, “because no matter what organization you’re working for or what environment you’re in, that’s what you have to keep top-of-mind: What am I doing to help my community? What am I doing to help my workers? How am I contributing to the betterment of mankind?”

Online EdD offers flexibility and access

“If there’s one thing we’ve all learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s how to pivot,” says Fryxell. “How to make things fit into our new lives. How to make it happen.”

As we move forward, he says, organizations also must adapt to new and continually changing environments and situations.

“What we hope to do in this program is really prepare students to be able to make those continuous changes they’re sure to face in their careers,” he says. “I think COVID brought this issue to the forefront—that you have to be adept at changing the way your organization does things, or your organization won’t survive. That’s why the ability to adapt and change is the focus of our entire program. But it’s not only because of COVID. Those abilities were important before the pandemic, and they’ll still be important afterward.”

He predicts we’re going to continue seeing significant changes at all levels of education as technology keeps moving forward.

“I think online programs will continue to grow and develop, and as technology advances and new software comes up, it will be amazing. We can do things online now that you couldn’t do even a year ago. Hardly anybody even knew what Zoom was one year ago.”

He says there’s already been a strong online presence at Chaminade for some time. “So many of our professors, including myself, have been teaching online since the beginning of online education. So with COVID and the forced move to technology, it just really had to do with bringing more people along into a modern online world. It’s something we’re really well-prepared for, and I think it’s going to keep evolving and developing.

“And at Chaminade, we’ll be there continuing to evolve and develop right along with it.”

For more information, see the EdD in Organizational Leadership. Applications for the first online EdD session, which starts on July 6, 2021, are due on June 18.

Service in Action, A Peace Corps Volunteer’s Story

March 12, 2021

“When I’m older, I want to join the Peace Corps.”

Her uncle’s stories of the Peace Corps, living in a faraway place called Togo (West Africa) among people very different from him yet who became lifelong friends, had captured the imagination of Alice Potter ’18, a precocious 4-year-old. It was in her blood.

Potter and her family grew up in California while her father worked as a software engineer, and they also spent years living abroad, in Italy, Germany and France. Returning to the United States for college was never part of Potter’s plan; however, her mother did an internet search for colleges in the U.S. “with a good record of acceptance and graduation rates,” and Chaminade University of Honolulu popped up. The positive reviews about Chaminade’s student-to-faculty ratio, affordable tuition, overall quality, coupled with its location and Hawai‘i’s mild weather, all sounded very appealing. Her mother told her that if she got in, she would be going to the Marianist university. And to Potter’s surprise, the acceptance letter came. She was anxious to be going back to the U.S. and of all places the most remote 50th state.

There’s no place like Hawai‘i

Intimidated at first, she soon made new friends and began thriving in Chaminade’s customized learning experience. She also shared its values of serving the community by volunteering at the Waikīkī Aquarium. Aside from her studies, Potter also fell in love with Hawai‘i’s marine life and flora and enjoyed learning about the islands’ rich history. “Never before had I encountered a place so profoundly connected to its people like in Hawai‘i,” she says.

Living her dream of joining the Peace Corps

Alice Potter '18 with her counterpart in the Peace Corps — *^{Alice with her counterpart Mrs. Irma}*

Potter graduated with a bachelor’s in communication degree with an environmental studies minor in 2018. At age 23, ready for a new adventure, she jumped at the opportunity to live her dream and join the Peace Corps. Because she spoke conversational French, Potter had hoped to be assigned to Africa specifically in Senegal; however, there was an opening to teach English in Southeast Asia. She had lived in a variety of places, yet she remembers experiencing culture shock when arriving in Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country with more than 267 million people with a Muslim majority. She was immediately struck by the language barrier and the lack of personal space in this bustling yet conservative, spiritual society.

The Peace Corps helps new volunteers acclimate to their new country through an intensive two to three months Pre-Service Training (PST) program. Potter explains this included language lessons, cultural classes, as well as learning about Peace Corps procedures and the country’s rules and local customs, providing the skills and knowledge you need to thrive on your own. During this time, she lived with the first of three host families.

“My host family during PST was especially kind, patient, helpful and accepting, and I became very close to them,” Potter says. Her host family warmly welcomed her into their home, introducing Potter to many delicious Indonesian dishes, such as sate (marinated meat skewers), cap cai (stir-fried vegetables sometimes mixed with meat), nasi goring (fried rice) and rawon (beef soup), which became her favorite. Potter was relieved that one of her host twin sisters, Dhea, spoke English, helping her with the transition and translating for her twin, Adhe, and their parents.

Once her assignment began, Potter lived with two other host families: a single mother with grown children, a driven career woman who worked as a caterer for weddings and funerals, as well as a seamstress and a make-up artist; and a young couple who introduced her to carp rearing, bird catching and coffee time. A neighboring family acted as her “mom and dad” when Potter needed adult assistance and they took her on day trips.

Teaching is learning

Potter was assigned to a vocational training high school near East Java, where she taught English to 15 to 18-year-old students, 85 percent of them male and the rest female. School was held seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. with extracurricular activities held on Saturdays. Potter says she taught two or three classes each day; class periods were two hours long for sophomores and juniors and one hour for seniors. The school offered career paths for students in fields such as auto mechanics, electrical work, computer work and broadcasting.

Alice Potter '18 with her students while in the Peace Corps

“Most of the time my students called me ‘Mister,’ or ‘mbak’ or ‘kak,’ which is equivalent to saying young miss or older sibling,” explains Potter. “I was the youngest teacher at the school,” she adds.

Halfway through her service, Potter was riding her bicycle back to school after a lunch break when she was hit by a motorcycle from behind. “Even though I was wearing a helmet, I had a pretty serious concussion. A piece of asphalt got inside one of the helmet vents and cut my scalp,” she says. “I also had cuts on my upper lip, under my eye and the edge of my forehead and some gashes along the right side of my face, arms and legs. Fortunately, I only needed stitches,” she adds.

The Peace Corps kept her in the capital for a few weeks for regular check-ups at the hospital. When she returned to school, she smiles as she remembers how the entire community—her host family, students and teachers—all offered to drive her home so she wouldn’t have to walk. “Student after student kept begging me to ride home with them,” she says with a laugh. The community was close-knit, reminding her of her ‘ohana at Chaminade.

“The insight I gained from the students was invaluable,” she readily admits. As a teacher’s assistant, Potter adds she learned so much more from her students than she could have ever imagined. “My students taught me patience and acceptance. They also taught me to acknowledge the cultural differences of education in Indonesia versus in the U.S. and that young adults, no matter where you are in the world, want to be heard. It was amazing to watch them blossom,” Potter says. Their hospitality and intelligence impressed her day in and day out.

Potter learned to speak English, French, Italian and German while growing up and could now count Bahasa Indonesian as her fifth language.

A lasting impact

Alice Potter '18 with her fellow faculty members while in the Peace Corps

The Peace Corps profoundly changed Potter’s life. She learned the importance of keeping an open mind and welcoming others from different backgrounds with appreciation and understanding. While the Peace Corps may not be for everyone, Potter believes everyone could benefit from broadening their perspective by experiencing other cultures. “Immersing yourself in a different country with a foreign language and culture will humble you, and you’ll learn so much about yourself,” she confesses. “The Peace Corps was a beautiful, eye-opening experience that made a lasting impact,” she adds.

Potter keeps in touch with her first host family and hopes to go back to Indonesia as soon as it’s safe to do so. Saya meninggalkan sesuatu istimewa. “I left behind something special,” she translates.

What’s next?

After her 27-month stint in the Peace Corps, Potter moved back to California. Today, she continues to serve youth by teaching part-time in an after-school program. What’s next for Potter? She hopes to put her communication degree to use and strive toward her next goal of becoming a producer or film director.

Coming Full Circle

March 10, 2021

Kristine Stebbins ‘87 remembers completing a long list of internships as a Communication undergraduate at Chaminade, including the one that would launch her whirlwind career and eventually bring her back to the islands for an executive role created expressly for her.

Kristine Stebbins '87, senior vice president and director of digital experience innovation and technology at Bank of Hawai'i

Stebbins was recently named senior vice president and director of digital experience innovation and technology at Bank of Hawai’i. The position is an opportunity for the longtime marketing entrepreneur—who has been breaking ground in the industry for decades—to come full circle, returning to the place where she met her husband, attended college and began to build her marketing philosophy.

She described her work at Bank of Hawai’i as “one of those awesome roles.”

“I have the opportunity to look five years down the line at the ways we’re planning to build these amazing digital experiences,” she said, adding that digital innovation is an exciting and growing area of the banking sector that has been put on a fast-track because of the pandemic. “Today when you’re looking at marketing in particular, you need to think of yourself as a marketing technologist.”

Stebbins said her projects at Bank of Hawai’i have allowed her to bring her marketing and digital innovation expertise to bear to create excellent digital customer experiences. Stebbins joined Bank of Hawai’i full-time after previously serving as a consultant for the company, including on a key digital transformation project that helped put the institution on the right footing for the pandemic.

In other words, she was designing for the future.

And that was a role she was completely comfortable with. After all, Stebbins likes to say the only constant in marketing is change. Every five years or so, there’s a big disruption in the industry—the kind of seismic shifts that companies can learn to dread. Great marketing strategy, she says, is about harnessing those moments and using them to create new opportunities to reach customers.

“The pandemic has been a moment where it’s basically made digital interactions in banking a requirement,” she said. “So we’re trying to build out digital experiences that bring humans together.”

Her message to young marketing professionals is one she learned early on, too, including as a Chaminade student: Be ready for those moments of disruption by embracing adaptability and change.

A start in Hawai’i—and at Chaminade

Kristing Stebbins '87 at her Chaminade graduation

Indeed, change has defined some of the biggest moments in her life.

Stebbins secured her first position in marketing with an internship, which she acquired through Chaminade, at top-rated advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather. She worked in their Honolulu office and got hired shortly after graduation. It was a dream come true.

It was also far from the life she’d imagined for herself just a few years earlier.

Stebbins had first come to Hawai’i with no intention of staying. She was visiting for the summer to spend time with her brother, who was in the Navy. Stebbins would take the bus into town and then back to Makakilo. And it was at a bus stop at Ala Moana Center that she met her future husband.

Kristine Stebbins '87 with her husband John Stebbins

She’d asked him for directions and the two ended up spending the day together. And then summer together. When it came time to head back home to Texas, she did—and he followed. John Stebbins ended up driving her to the East Coast to drop her off at college and then going back to the islands.

A semester later, it was Kristine Stebbins who was knocking on his door. She’d transferred to Chaminade University and he enrolled a short time later. They were both taking classes together and would graduate within a year of one another. They married in 1988 at Seabury Hall on Maui.

Stebbins says she is still grateful to have transferred to Chaminade, and not just to be closer to her husband-to-be. She said Chaminade offered a more individualized experience and gave her access to opportunities she wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else. She counts her experiences at the University as central to setting her up for success and can still rattle off the names of some of the professors who served as her Chaminade mentors, including Communications Professor Dr. Mary Jude Yablonsky.

In addition to an internship at Ogilvy & Mather, Stebbins also worked at Chaminade’s student newspaper and the radio station and secured an internship at Hawai’i Public Television. She says of her mentors at Chaminade, “Obviously, they stuck with me.” Speaking to Chaminade Magazine, she added, “They were so supportive. They really guided me and encouraged me to get that real-life experience.”

Kristine Stebbins '87 with Dr. Mary Jude Yablonsky — *^{Kristine Stebbins ’87 with Dr. Mary Jude Yablonsky}*

Experience, she said, that was invaluable. It gave her an opportunity to apply what she’d learned in classrooms in a real-world setting—doing everything paid employees were doing—and she was hooked.

After graduation, Stebbins and her husband stayed in Hawai’i for several years, building their careers.

And then they headed to the mainland, moving to new cities—San Francisco, New York City, Seattle—as new opportunities emerged. Stebbins worked as global account director for IBM, senior marketing manager at Microsoft, and as a marketing consultant to some of the world’s biggest brands.

She also started her own marketing company, which she later sold.

All the while, the two maintained a strong connection to Hawai’i, especially after their daughter was born. (She’s now a junior in high school.) John Stebbins still has family in the islands, and this is where they one day saw themselves returning. They didn’t think it would be quite so soon, Stebbins said.

But then, as she often says, embrace change—because it’s inevitable.

During the pandemic, Stebbins started to assess her life and her work. She realized she’d been doing the work she wanted to do already, with Bank of Hawai’i. Fast forward several months and they were offering her a position, a new digital innovation role at the company created just for her.

She joined the bank in September, taking the first step in transitioning her family back to Hawai’i.

‘The world is definitely changing’

In addition to a passion for marketing, Stebbins is committed to helping the next generation. She believes strongly in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education programs, especially those targeted at young girls. She’s even coached a Robotics team for the Girl Scouts.

Stebbins is also proud to work for a Hawai’i company with a strong commitment to diversity—and no shortage of women in executive positions. Things weren’t always that way in executive suites, she said, and in some places they still aren’t. In fact, Stebbins recalls that when she first started out at Ogilvy & Mather she couldn’t speak at meetings with major clients even when she was a topic’s expert.

“You laugh now because it’s so outrageous but is indicative of the experience in terms of how far we’ve come,” she said, adding that there have been many times in which she was the only woman in a boardroom. Her advice if they underestimate you: Let them—so you can prove them wrong.

“Quite frankly, I’m pretty smart and I know what I’m talking about,” she said, adding young women entering the business now may not face all the same barriers she faced but will undoubtedly face some of them. “You need to be confident in your abilities. It’s all a matter of being true to who you are.”

Plus, she added, “The good news is the world is definitely changing.”

And Stebbins is all in for that.