Tending to Growth

By Texas Tech University

April 5^th, 2024

“It’s only after you’ve stepped outside your comfort zone that you begin to change, grow, and transform.”

- Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

Kai Matsuda, a junior majoring in Honors Science & the Humanities, is tending to growth toward his future beyond college by working at the horticulture gardens at Texas Tech University.

Kai is a student assistant at the Texas Tech Horticulture Gardens. Kai joined the horticulture gardens as a student assistant during the spring semester, coming from a job as a barista at Starbucks.

“My favorite thing to do in the greenhouse is to reorganize our chamber, which hosts a lot of our cacti, succulents, and tropicals. I like to spend a lot of time there. But I also just love cutting back stuff if it’s dead. If it’s not worth it, just cut it. It’s a really good testament for life's sake too; if they are not giving you something back, cut it off,” he said.

Before taking a horticulture job, Kai decided to venture out of his comfort zone and sign up for an honors course called "The Path Chooses Us," where students learned how to backpack and document their experience along the way, via camera. Kai and other students endured a week-long 60-mile trip through the Guadalupe Mountains backcountry to Guadalupe Peak on foot. During the trip, Kai broadened his passion for plants, leading him to take on the student assistant position in the gardens.

“I’ve always had a subtle interest in ecology and plants, but I really think being out in the wilderness for a week pushed me a little more forward to know I am an organism just like everything around me,” Kai said. “It kind of just let me think long enough that I did want to work with plant materials."

“I don’t want to set myself to one career for the rest of my life,” he said. “I am also interested in teaching English in Japan or teaching English to the Peace Corps if they need it. I am also interested in ethnobotany and apothecaries, so my interest is knowing that step one is the plant. Your medicine, coffee, beer, all come from a plant. So I think knowing the foundations of how to cultivate these things will help me in the long run.”

Kai strives to learn all he can about plants now in different environments at a small scale, so hopefully one day when he's helping on bigger projects, he can know what to do.