Katalina Ma: strength in numbers

As someone who studied maths through university, and later taught it for 15 years, Katalina Ma knows numbers don’t just communicate facts – they can tell a story.

Using data to illustrate what success looks like is part of the job for Katalina, who is the University’s Pathways Programme manager. A member of the Schools and Community Engagement team, she’s charged with supporting young Māori and Pacific people to make a successful transition from high school into and through University.

“One question that young people will ask you is, ‘why should I care?’ And you really need to show them evidence, the data, to paint a compelling picture that proves why something matters,” she says.

She shares an example from Pacific Academy, a University mentoring and tutoring programme that supports Māori and Pacific senior secondary school students sitting external assessments in maths and science. For some high school students, it’s possible to gather enough credits through internal assessments to gain University Entrance, but Katalina has worked with the Planning and Information Office to source data that proves why end-of-year exam experience still matters.

“The data shows that for students who come into University with at least 20 credits from external exams, there is a 92 percent success rate in their first year. But if they come in with none, that success rate falls to 65 percent,” she says.

“We also show the Pacific Academy students an example of a first-year accounting paper – a core paper that needs to be done as part of an accounting or finance major in a BCom – and we ask, ‘What do you notice?’ The first thing they see is that 50 percent of their total mark comes from an exam component.
For some other courses, the exam component is even higher.”

They’re insights she’s been able to share with a wider audience of secondary students and teachers through another initiative she oversees: the UE Success Plan. Launched in 2023 in partnership with 12 Auckland secondary schools, the plan aims to boost students’ academic success and Māori and Pacific UE achievement rates, to gain parity with overall rates by 2030. It has since grown to 15 schools, widening the doors of opportunity at university.

“A big part of these initiatives is ensuring that young people have as many options as they can, as early as they can,” says Katalina, “because the more you close down your options, the fewer opportunities you ultimately have to choose from.”

Community support

It’s an understanding that Katalina grew up with, and was instilled by her father, who she says also passed on a passion for maths.

“A love of maths is something my siblings and I share with my dad, who was very keen on the subject. He had a strong belief that if we were capable students in maths, then it would offer us more options in terms of what we could go on to do in the future.”

Crucially, he wasn’t a lone voice.

“He found opportunities for us to get support. We used to go to the house of a friend of his on Saturday afternoons, and this friend would ask us real-life questions about maths that engaged us and kept our interest.

“Then there was a homework centre at Mt Roskill Grammar that my dad ran, alongside some other Tongan parents. It was a place where we could improve and where university was seen as a pathway because we had uni students, a lot of them also Tongan, who were teaching us.

“My parents were big supporters of higher education, and believers that higher education can transform lives. What I liked about their approach was that they found a group of other parents who had those same beliefs about wanting to give their kids options, so it was done as a collective within a community.”

At the end of high school, Katalina gained a scholarship through the University’s Department of Maths to do the equivalent of the Summer Start programme, which introduces students to University life and study before they start their first semester.

“I enjoyed it so much that I decided I wanted to do a Bachelor of Science majoring in maths. The experience also exposed me to the Tuākana programme, so when my friends started in Semester One, I already had my ID card and knew where to go for lectures and could tell them about the support that was available to us.”

Ultimately, she decided teaching was the path she wanted to take: “It aligned with my values of wanting to serve young people, especially in a subject that I enjoyed, but also because there were so few of us. I can remember being the only Pacific person in my calculus class, so I wanted to be able to show other young people the opportunities maths can offer.”

Taking up the challenge

One of Katalina’s passions as a teacher was helping students find enjoyment in maths, and as early as possible, to help them be more successful in later stages.

It’s been the impetus for her involvement with the South Auckland Maths Challenge (SAMC), which she set up with her former University classmate Josephina Tamatoa (a former Department of Mathematics professional teaching fellow).

The high school maths competition, which pits student teams against each other to solve maths problems, evolved out of an experience she had as a teacher in 2018.

“I had accompanied a school team to a regional maths competition for the first time, and on the ride home, they said, ‘Do you teach us the same stuff as those other schools? Because we just got a hiding.’

“I reflected on our lead-up and training and we, as a department, had just wanted to expose them to something new. But they didn’t just want to participate; they wanted to compete. And to compete requires practice. It’s like a sport, where you have to train and test yourselves against others.”

SAMC launched in 2019, with teams of year nine and ten students from six schools competing, with the aim of getting them match fit to compete in bigger, regional competitions. The challenge has since expanded to central and west Auckland schools and to include students from year five upwards.

Katalina continues to be involved with the challenge in her University role, which she took on in 2023 when she made the shift from her job as assistant principal at Māngere College. This year she was thrilled to learn that three Pacific Academy students had come through the SAMC ranks.

Initiatives such as SAMC, Pacific Academy and the UE Success Plan involve a team of people from across the University, as well as schools, which she says is one of the joys of her job.

“There are so many different pockets of knowledge around the University that you get to learn from, and we’re also able to collectively support one another as we think about the journey of a young person from application to enrolment, through to study and graduation.

“For young Māori and Pacific people especially, it’s not a journey that they take alone, and it’s not a success that they experience alone. I’m proud that this is an active university that goes out and supports young people, their families and school communities so that their students have better preparedness and can succeed in whatever they want to do.”

– Caitlin Sykes