About careers using Field Māori subjects

Ko Tainui te waka

healthcare centres. 

My job was mainly to provide advice and to work with our clinical staff to make sure that the healthcare that we were providing our iwi was culturally safe and worked for our whānau.

And I was also working with our kaumātua and our whanaunga around the pā to vaccinate them all against Covid.

Yeah so, who inspired me to pursue science?

A couple of people and my mama was one of them.

So she has been working in the healthcare field for a very long time and I actually grew up in our pā with our medical centres running around as a little child talking to the doctors and the nurses.

And I used to always be really fascinated by the mahi that they did.

The second person or people, I should say, that inspired me to pursue science was actually my whanau.

We have a lot of sick whānau around where I live in my pā and they really needed... I really wanted to help them in a way so that they could grow old.

And I thought science and pursuing that field would be the best way to do it.

Yeah so, the most rewarding thing I think for me with mahi and to be a Māori in the science field is bringing,.... two things, it's bringing te ao Māori and mātauranga Māori into the science field is a big one for me.

I work around a lot of people who want that for our people and I think that's and I think that's really rewarding.

The second thing is there's so many different opportunities in science.

I'm only 23 and the career opportunities I've had in the science space have been massive.

There are so many different career paths you can go down and there's so many different opportunities and it's a really close-knit group and it's a really supportive environment to be in.

So those would be the two most rewarding things about science, I think.

It would be great for more Māori students to pursue science.

I think it's a field that is really rewarding and it's a field that gives you the opportunity to give back to Māori and to help pursue and to help overcome challenges that Maori often have in the science space.

Whether that be through the medical field or through microbiology, that's quite a common field.

There's so many challenges that Māori have in that space and I think it's really important that 

we have more Māori in those spaces to contribute and to bring a Māori voice to the table.

So, and as well as I said science is an extremely rewarding career.