Scholarships help me balance college with work

Robyn Saronitman is an accounting major in her last year at Kaua'i Community College. She grew up on Kaua'i and started her college classes online after graduating from Kaua'i High School in 2020. She currently works as a sales associate at a surf shop in Poipu and is an intern with the County of Kauai Real Property Tax Collection department.

She is a current recipient of the Antone & Edene Vidinha Trust Scholarship and is a past recipient of the Kaua'iCC Accounting Scholarship and the Alaka'ina UH Community Colleges Scholarship. This is an excerpt of her thank you letter to her current donors.

I chose Kaua'i Community College because I reside on the island of Kaua'i and due to financial hardships, attending a school outside of Kaua'i just wasn't in my favor. My career goals after school are to enter the accounting field and work in bookkeeping or payroll and maybe one day even start my own business.

The best piece of advice I have ever received was to keep pushing through even if you're ready to give up, College has been my biggest obstacle since I graduated high school. I have always had a hard time with completing assignments and passing courses with qualifying grades. There were so many times where I wanted to just drop out, but I knew it would disappoint my mom.

Last year was my hardest. I tried taking a number of courses just to reach credit requirements and I struggled with keeping up with the work and working at my job. That led me to dropping classes which caused me to have to go into more semesters.

My experience at UH has been amazing. I graduated high school in 2020 so I wasn't able to get that in-person experience on the Kaua'i CC campus due to COVID and I have been online ever since. But I do prefer having asynchronous classes because it allows me to balance being a student-worker.

To my donors

I just want to give a big thank you to the Antone & Edene Vidinha Charitable Trust. Since my first semester of college to now, they have always supported me in funding for my education.

Being a full-time student and full-time worker is really hard. I struggle with finding a proper balance and tend to have to limit the number of classes I am taking in order to work at my job.

Without these scholarships, I probably would be struggling even more because I'm paying for school on my own and I also have bills to pay. This scholarship allows me to attend school freely, take a decent number of classes and maintain my busy work schedule. Thank you!