From working at Dole Pineapple Cannery and Times Supermarket to becoming an executive at the Wall Street Journal, class of 1976 Kalaheo graduate, Patrick Chu, talks of humble beginnings at the school that shaped him, and how he joined USA Today, a newspaper. Later, he joined and currently works at the Wall Street Journal and lives in New York City. 

"Those minimum-wage jobs taught me about the value of money and incentivized me to be ambitious.  I didn’t want to end up working minimum-wage jobs all my life,” Mr. Chu said.  Upon graduating from the University of Hawaii in 1981, Mr. Chu was able to get an internship at The Wall Street Journal in Washington, D.C. “While working there, I worked on getting a master’s degree at American University and later joined USA TODAY as its first stock market reporter in 1984, where I worked for 10 years,” Mr. Chu explained. 

Later, Mr. Chu went on to work for news companies such as The Oregonian and as a global managing editor at Bloomberg News. As a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal, now living in New York, Mr. Chu oversees the process of content for the Dow Jones Newswires Desk. And while Mr. Chu is highly established in his career now, this wasn’t always the case. Mr. Chu reflects on how he felt about which career path to take after school. “I was pretty clueless. I think a lot of us were. Plus, we were the first graduating high school class from Kalaheo so there were no pioneers or trailblazers before us. No senior class before us. No alumni.  I will say I was fortunate and blessed to have great parents and a community that was very like-minded and that was reflected in the school,”  Mr. Chu recalled. 

And while there were no former students to look up to, Mr. Chu recounts, there were always teachers who were there for the kids at Kalaheo. “I will always remember the teachers that made us better, the ones that made us curious about the world. They made us think on our feet. Jim Schlosser in his first role at Kalaheo as an English teacher once called me the most analytical student he had when I was a senior.  That was a badge I was extremely proud of.  We had great educators like Sara Iwai, Walter Gudot, and Guy Funakoshi. The shame of it is, that we just didn’t know how good they were as mentors and how much we valued and appreciated them. Perhaps now, we can honor them.”