In week’s Micronesian Monday Feature, we learn about journalist K-Andrea Evarose Limol, who is Chuukese and Yapese. K-Andrea is Xavier High School alum, a Gates Millennium Scholar and now a junior reporter for the Marianas Variety in Saipan. 

The day applications were due, K-Andrea Evarose Limol was feeling sick. 

It was her senior year at Xavier High School. She’d applied for several different scholarships and applied to different colleges. She still had classes and other school activities she was involved in. Feeling under the weather but determined nonetheless, on the last possible day she could, K-Andrea went to turn in her application for the ultra-competitive Gates Millennium Scholarship. A possible full ride to a U.S. university. About 1,000 students out of 50,000 applicants are selected every year. 

And the day K-Andrea applied, the power went out.

“Of course the power went out,” she said. “It was literally just a few hours away from the deadline.” 

Her teachers and her moderators and K-Andrea scrambled to get the application in, making calls to people stateside, explaining the situation, and making arrangements to get the application. 

“Literally just a few hours before the deadline, I submitted everything,” K-Andrea said. 

Unbeknownst to her at the time, a future K-Andrea would be living a few islands away in Saipan, working in an industry defined by deadlines. 

The chaos surrounding her application left K-Andrea feeling discouraged. But her story is a living example of Wayne Gretzky’s often-repeated saying, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” 

Had she let the power outage or the looming deadline or her self-doubt keep her from turning in the application, K-Andrea wouldn’t have had a chance to be considered for the Gates Millennium Scholarship. But because she persisted, her application landed in the hands of the reviewers and she was selected. 

“My teacher who had nominated me, she told me the news that I had gotten it and I was like, ‘No way,’” K-Andrea said. “I was like, ‘There’s no way. Like, how? I rushed through it. I was so sick. I don’t even remember if my spelling and grammar was right.’” 

Her disbelief abated and was replaced by joy and then overwhelming gratitude. Later that day, she found herself in the school chapel, alone. 

“I just broke down in tears,” she said. “It was just an intimate moment with God.” 

The tears were a combination of joy and sadness.

Since she was a child, her late grandparents instilled in her a drive to do well in her studies, to take education seriously.

“It was a bittersweet moment. I was happy that I got the scholarship but I was also really sad that the people who helped me along the way, not all of them were alive that day to really witness that.” 

K-Andrea is a third-generation college graduate and her selection for the Gates Millennium Scholarship was a source of pride for her family and for her village. In true Pacific Islander fashion, when she graduated from Xavier High School, her mom’s entire village came out in a massive show of support. 

“To have like not just my family support but also to have the village that I grew up in, come out and support, it just meant so much to me,” K-Andrea said. “And that was really like one of the driving factors for me to also do well in college….To set an example for other kids from my village. Like, I didn’t start out doing really well in English or in school. 

I started off as that foreign kid who didn’t speak a lot of English and didn’t really understand what was going on to becoming this scholar.”

K-Andrea was raised by a young, single Chuukese mother. She was born in Saipan but moved around a lot as a kid. At one point she lived in Guam and then Hawaii before her family moved back to Chuuk.

“Chuukese has always been my first language,” she said, adding that her grandparents insisted she and her cousins would learn Chuukese primarily. They’d learn to read, write and understand their native tongue before learning English. 

“I actually struggled as a young kid. I could understand English but I couldn’t really speak it. But the more that I went to school, the better that my English became.” 

After graduating from Xavier, K-Andrea went to Fordham University in Bronx, New York. The island girl found herself navigating the figurative and literal cold New York environment and she knew that it wasn’t the place for her. 

“I was used to that community feeling, everybody’s courteous and they’ll say ‘Hi’ to each other,” she said. 

She toughed it out for a year but not without voicing her express dislike for her new surroundings. 

“I remember complaining to my family. I was like, ‘I hate it here. I want to go. I want to transfer,’” she said. 

After her first year at Fordham, K-Andrea knew she needed a place that had that sense of community she’d grown up with. She took some time off school and spent time in Alaska with her dad. Some people in her life thought her break from school would be permanent. But K-Andrea persisted. After a semester break, she was ready to go back to college and now she had a better idea of what she wanted out of her college experience, beyond the academics. 

She wanted to return to New York but not Fordham. So she researched other schools and found one with a slogan that made her heart sing. 

“‘Small college, big dreams.’ It had me thinking of ‘small island, big dreams,’” K-Andrea said.

Small college, big dreams: the slogan of St. Francis College.

K-Andrea found that community she was searching for in the halls of St. Francis. She did really well and graduated with honors, majoring in political science and minoring in environmental science. 

After graduation, she returned to Saipan. The year was 2020.

She was looking for a job and through a friend, learned of an opening at the Marianas Variety. The Variety has a long history of providing news in Micronesia and many journalists in the region have roots and connections to the Saipan newspaper. 

K-Andrea, a newly graduated political science major at first was hesitant about trying her hand at reporting. 

“I was thinking, ‘Why would I go into journalism? I don’t have a degree in journalism. What good would I do?’” 

But she interviewed for the job anyway. And her years studying political science helped boost her public speaking skills so she thought that might help her in this field. The more she thought about it, she thought she’d be able to put her degree to use and get a closer view of how local island politics worked. 

“It’s one thing to learn something in a textbook and then another thing to see it happen in real life,” she said. “I wanted that real-life experience. I felt like this job was a door to that.” 

She got the job and on her first day, she was thrown right into local politics. 

Seasoned editors care not if it is your first day or your last, they have a paper to put together and a reporter on duty is expected to produce. So like many a cub reporter before her, K-Andrea’s first day was a trial by fire. 

“I had to cover this house session. I had no idea what I’m supposed to pay attention to. I literally took so many pages of notes,” K-Andrea said. “Afterwards, I was like, ‘I can’t read my writing, what I wrote.’”  

She still put together a report and submitted her draft for her editor to look over. 

Her editor asked her who was there. 

K-Andrea had been so wrapped up in the session she’d forgotten to get names. 

“I was like, ‘Oh no,’” she said. 

She was crestfallen but undeterred. She turned to the senior reporter she was shadowing to help her identify the officials present at the session. The senior reporter explained who was who and all was well. 

With her first day, her first byline, and first copy crisis behind her, K-Andrea returned to work every day after that, continuing to report for the Variety.

“I love it. I love the flexibility of it. I love what you learn from it,” she said. “I've learned so much that I never even knew, like, so much information that I didn't even know that I needed to know, as a constituent and as a taxpayer.

“I was like, ‘Wow, so this is how the system works.’ And I was like, ‘Ohhh, the system's kind of a little bit broken.’” 

K-Andrea said she also loves how the news aims to be balanced and fair and independent. 

“I feel like that’s a very important life skill,” she said. “You really learn how to filter information you receive, not just from work but just life in general.”

The news never sleeps and while K-Andrea finds herself tired and sometimes wishing for more time off, she recognizes the importance of keeping the community informed. That often drives her to keep doing what she is doing. 

“The work that’s being done and what I’m learning from it, it makes it worth it. Yes, I’m tired. But it’s important to keep the community informed because there are so many community members who don’t know what’s going on in their government, these are people that they voted for,” she said. “These are decisions that involve them, that affect them, that trickles down to them and they’re just not aware.”

For other aspiring Micronesian professionals, K-Andrea encourages them to step outside their comfort zone.

“Do something different, take a different path,” she said. “I've met so many Micronesians who are so good and so talented in so many different fields and industries, but they just stick to what their family knows. They just tend to migrate towards the norms, the social norms, and my advice to young aspiring Micronesian professionals it's just don't be afraid to take your own path.”◉

I had a blast chatting with K-Andrea! She is so vibrant and so smart and I’m thrilled to see a fellow Micronesian in media. I’m in awe that she is cutting her journalism teeth in Saipan. Follow her work with the Marianas Variety here. And send her news tips!

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