This year’s winner of the Salt Spring Community Energy Solar Scholarship is Tida Hasegawa. She will be pursuing a Bachelor of Science Program at the University of Victoria beginning in the summer of 2027, after gap year travel to Germany.

Tida Hasegawa – Bio

My family and I moved to Canada when I was 7, and I was lucky enough to be raised on Salt Spring Island along with my 2 younger brothers. From grade 3 through grade 7, my parents always put me in the nature program where I got to spend a lot more time outside of the classroom, learning real-life skills and expanding my knowledge on animals, plants, andq stories. Outside of school, I was mostly outdoors, building forts in the forest, looking for bird nests, drawing plants in a notebook, carving knives and bow and arrows, gardening, and so much more.

English being my second language, academics was something I struggled with, the only subject that I liked being math because of the lack of words. After my elementary years, I became one of the top students in my grade and after receiving top academics in grade 9, the language barrier became something that pushed me to work harder.

As someone who grew up learning how to start fires from scratch, I became very attached to the land, and even though my future career was unclear to me, one think I knew for sure was that I would go into something related to the environment, hopefully applying my skills and knowledge to help make the world a better place. After my gap year, I will be attending the University of Victoria where I will explore many different areas of sciences in the General Science program. My top two classes I am interested in are Environmental Science/Engineering and Biomedical Engineering. To whatever area I end up working in, my biggest goal is to be able to impact the world in a positive way, and because of my passion for wildlife, hopefully resolving the many problems we are causing to the environment and ecosystems.