Sachiko Akiyama finds 'comfortable niche' as UNH professor

When Sachiko Akiyama was finishing college and planning to take her Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT), she finally realized she needed to stray against her family norms and follow her lifelong passion.

Akiyama is a sculpture professor here at the UNH, beginning about three years ago. She has not had the most linear path when it comes to her career. Science, art and her passion to succeed have driven her into a comfortable niche that she thrives in.

Throughout her entire life, her parents were always pushing her into the field of science, though since kindergarten she says she has known that working with hands and creating is her desire.

Growing up in rural Rochester, New York, Sachiko saw her classmates leaving high school with plans to go into business and medical schools, leaving her with the implied notion that she must follow suit. With her father as a doctor, she felt as though this was her best option.

Sachiko completed pre-medical school at Amherst College in Massachusetts with a degree in chemistry. After graduation, she began making plans to complete medical training to become a doctor. Or so her parents thought.

While her parents believed she was preparing for the MCAT, Sachiko was actually applying to art schools. This was the first step she took in the direction of art.

Sachiko then decided to teach high school science. After teaching courses in chemistry, biology, and marine biology for three years, Sachiko finally began to realize that although this career path was safe and definite, it was not where her heart truly belonged.

Uprooting herself from her comfortable position as a teacher, Sachiko left her high school teaching position in an attempt to get a degree in art, and return to another high school as an art teacher.

This dream started to become reality with her acceptance to Boston University’s graduate school and continued when she became a sculpture professor there.

Though technically her career as an artist started later on in life, Sachiko’s love for art began when she was very young. Whether she was hammering wood boards together when she was in kindergarten with the tool kit she asked her parents for, or bothering her parents by creating balls of Scotch tape, she was constantly creating something. This passion of hers was confirmed her freshman year of college during a sculpture class.

Now that Sachiko has been a sculpture artist for a few, she can still relate her artwork to the science-oriented world she was once surrounded by.

"My art is my way of trying to understand the world. Not trying to answer questions, but raise them,” Sachiko said. "I think science is also trying to understand the world, I just didn’t want to teach it.”

While art has made itself the most prominent in Sachiko’s life, one of the biggest challenges she faces lies within art itself. Sachiko explains that she loves to know the answers to most questions, and have a plan for everything, but art is not this way.

Sachiko explains that, in making art and succeeding in this career field, there is not one specific path you can take, and there is not always a fame factor or named position that you can be in as an artist to determine one’s success.

Although she says this anxiety-ridden part of the career is very prominent, Sachiko explains that this is what makes her thrive. She describes her need to do art every day similar to someone who needs to go to the gym everyday; if she cannot go to her studio she feels incomplete in a way.

"Art explains a lot of different things, as soon as I knew it was more than just making pretty things, I think that made me more excited about it,” Sachiko said.

Sachiko believes that taking art classes can help students be more creative and solve problems that can possibly help them answer bigger questions in their lives, and may even help some understand why we’re here.

"The stuff I do is so personal, not that it’s just roughly a self portrait, but it really is me trying to understand the bigger philosophical question of why we are here,” Sachiko said.