Miho Saito, Class of 2014

After graduating with the class of 2014, I moved to Japan for a year to train in starting a restaurant-bakery concept and then re-located to Hawaii to start one of the concepts in 2015. When I returned to California 2 years later, I took a career break to travel around the west coast out of a converted 4-Runner. Currently living in Long Beach, CA, I am pursuing two concurrent career paths as a professional actor and a senior recruiter for an agency specializing in hiring within the medical, biotech, life sciences, biopharma, and engineering industries. My present project is to source scientists who specialize in research for rare, age-related diseases as well as recruit candidates for positions to work on manufacturing vaccines for COVID-19. As an actor, I have booked projects for companies such as LYFT, Google, Facebook, and most recently, a commercial to launch Microsoft’s latest mixed-reality technology.

I fell in love with acting when I was encouraged to take classes to develop my craft and found that it was a great way to express my creativity. My concentration while I was a student at SUA was in Humanities with a focus in literature, so the art of storytelling is very familiar to me. My favorite courses at SUA were Haruki Murakami with John Kehlen, American Experience with Aneil Rallin, Physics with Phat Vu, and Forms of Comedy with Oleg Gelikman. These classes, albeit difficult, stretched my ability to critically think and also challenged my analyzing skills to dissect the written word to better understand the intent of the writer. It’s amazing that I am able to come full circle with my education, except I am now the storyteller.

I am eternally grateful for the experience I had at SUA because the values of Soka pedagogy pulse in my heart to this day. I genuinely enjoyed the discussions in class and how, through the readings and dialogues, I questioned what it truly means to be human – I feel this is a question I continue to ask myself. However, I believe the unique moments one experiences at SUA, whether it was an upperclassman leaving a sincere note by my door, having a candid heart-to-heart with a professor, or developing life long friendships, that are perhaps the answer. In a similar fashion of how we close every acting class with a “shout out” and a “take away,” I would like to shout out, with my deepest appreciation, Dr. Daisaku Ikeda for founding my beloved alma mater, and the donors for giving us students an opportunity to receive a world class education. My takeaway from my education at SUA is to strive to embrace, respect, and treasure all life.