A Vocation in Public Service

Judith Teruya ’18 blazed trails as a sophomore debater at Concordia, placing with her debate partner as a semi-finalist at the National Parliamentary Debate Associate Championship tournament. She went on to win the top speaker award at the national round-robin tournament at Rice University in 2018, the first time a Concordia debater had won that title.

Today, Teruya is a senior advisor for the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders and enjoying a burgeoning career in the nation’s capital.

“I feel vocationally called to the life of public service,” Teruya told Concordia Magazine. “There are a lot of stereotypes that folks hold about the government — about federal government, state government, about big entities that feel faceless and nameless. One of the privileges of having been in a place where I can see the people who work in government is that there are names and faces and good motivations behind people’s public service. The public sector can get a bad reputation from crooked politicians, but there is also a human element to people wanting to do good work and help other folks.”

Teruya was born, raised and homeschooled in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she participated in a speech and debate league, a passion which drew her to Concordia.

“[Concordia speech and debate director] Konrad Hack had always been present in the high school homeschool debate world, and I knew names like Amanda Ozaki ’15 and Chase Harrington ’14, from the high school circuit, who had gone to Concordia,” she says.

After taking a gap year to attend a Christian worldview training institution, she enrolled at Concordia in 2014 intending to join debate and study psychology.

“I felt very fortunate to find the behavioral science program,” she says. “In freshman year I went to Dr. John Lu’s office, who was the department chair at that time, to ask his advice as I tried to figure out what the next three years at Concordia would look like. He asked me some questions and said, ‘You don’t actually want to study psychology; you want to study sociology. The questions you are asking aren’t things psychology is going to be able to help you answer.’”

His answer stunned her momentarily, but her response over time turned to gratitude.

“I am very grateful to him for that conversation, because I did change my major to sociology and ended up working for Dr. Lu as a T.A. from sophomore year until I graduated,” Teruya says. “Dr. Lu, Dr. Kristen Koenig, and Dr. Jack Schultz each played such a huge part in helping me succeed academically and also pushed me interpersonally to grow as a human in understanding what vocation meant. I really appreciated how much the three of them — and others like [senior director of institutional research and effectiveness] Deborah Lee — were willing to invest in me not just as a student but as a person.”

Concordia’s debate team was in the midst of winning back-to- back national championships, and Teruya took notes on the upperclassmen’s methods.

“It was really cool to watch the juniors and seniors win and see how they debated,” she says. “Their technique and the way they went about competing inspired me to want to get to that level.”

In her sophomore year she partnered with Manoah Marton and embarked on “a crazy win streak,” winning three tournaments in a row and placing third in the nation, the highest final position any Concordia team had achieved up to that time. In her senior year, Teruya won first speaker at the national round-robin tournament.

“By some stroke of God’s grace I was able to be successful, but [it was] the friendships [that] were really meaningful to me in my college years and now,” she says. “There were always people you knew you could hang out with and study with on a Tuesday night or meet in the cafeteria on a Saturday morning for breakfast.”

Upon graduating, Teruya earned a masters degree in public policy from UCI while working as a graduate research assistant to Deborah Lee, whom she credits for “investing in me and putting me in situations to lead projects and present them to decision makers at the institution. It was good training for future career opportunities. A lot of the ways I conduct myself as a professional, I learned from Deborah.”

Her sights were set on academia, but a policy-based research assistantship in Washington, D.C. changed her mind.

“That was the first time I got to see the world of public policy in the federal government,” she says. “I met people who worked in Congress and federal agencies and saw what that career could be like — people who were like me with a variety of different undergraduate degrees, all coming to work in the federal government to serve their country in the public sphere.”

She decided to return to D.C. first as a congressional fellow and then as a staffer for a Congress member from New York for three years. In that capacity, she shepherded legislation through Congress that launched a commission to study the creation of a national museum on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders history and culture, which was signed into law in June 2022.

“That was one of the coolest places God put me in — to be part of creating something that will become a museum dedicated to this portion of our country’s history and culture,” she says.

Today, as senior advisor at the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, she believes in creating pragmatic policy solutions where possible.

“Public service is where I have found my vocational calling,” she says. “I think God made my brain to see problems and solutions, and I have been able to find a career where my nine-to-five is figuring out how to solve problems that the government can solve. It is not big and flashy and is not going to make the headlines in The New York Times, but it is still creating change and helping improve something.”

Her current work is “largely informed by the amount of time we spent at Concordia thinking about what it means to be wise, honorable and cultivated,” she says. “Part of that is knowing what is going on in your local context. None of us lives in silos. Part of wisdom and being a good citizen is staying informed and participating in your community at the level you’re able to.”

Teruya keeps in touch with her professors and dreams of one day getting a PhD.

“I recognize how blessed I was by their investment in my life and don’t think I would have achieved some of the things I have without their guidance and support while I was in college,” she says.