Welcome to Student Life’s new monthly student spotlight series, Who-who-who Hoosiers! Read along as we shine a light on the people who make IU Bloomington a vibrant place to learn and grow.
Hitting all the right notes
When senior Hikaru Akiba joined the Marching Hundred her freshman year, the decision was more like muscle memory. It quickly turned into so much more.
“At first, I just joined marching band because that’s what I did in high school—I didn’t really have any interest in being a music major,” she said. “Pretty quickly, though, I realized I had a lot of fun doing it and really loved the people.”
She’s still not a music major—choosing instead to earn an B.A. in honors history—but she’s found her people and her sense of belonging in Marching Hundred and the Big Red Basketball Band. She plays mellophone (like the trumpet but with a more “mellow” sound) and has worked her way up to Undergraduate Staff. In that role, she mentors 16 fellow musicians in improving their musical and visual performance during football and basketball games.
Hikaru really enjoys being part of the game day action. “I love seeing it all up close,” she said. “Like when we played Illinois a few weeks ago, I was on the field but couldn’t hear a thing because of the crowd. Even when we were losing by 30 points my freshman year, it was just really fun to be with my band friends.”
But band isn’t her only campus community. Hikaru is also a host at the Wylie House Museum, where she leads tours interpreting the house’s 200-year history and organizes kid-friendly crafts. She was recently hired at the Asian Culture Center as a student collections assistant, helping to organize, describe, and preserve papers, photographs, digital objects, and more.
Even when we were losing by 30 points my freshman year, it was just really fun to be with my band friends.
These on-campus jobs play into her academic and personal interests. She’s really interested in museum and archival work, and in spring 2025, she was an archives intern at the District of Columbia Office of Public Records and Archives. While there, she transcribed 19th century handwritten records, created inventories of archival collections, and scanned physical materials like birth certificates.
That experience sparked her dream to one day work in a museum (maybe the Smithsonian or the Indiana State Archives), which naturally led her to IU’s Accelerated Master’s Program in Library Science. This May, she’ll graduate with a bachelor’s degree in history, and next spring, she’ll have her master’s too.
But no matter whether she’s playing, studying, or working on campus, Hikaru is happy to be a Hoosier.
“There are so many things to discover here!” she said. “You never know what you’re going to find. Yesterday, I was just sitting in the Wylie House, and a student wandered in and was like, ‘What is this?’ I encourage people to walk around campus and join clubs and other activities to help them really discover what they want to do.”
Fun facts about Hikaru
- She played trumpet with Carmel (Ind.) High School’s marching band, which won the Bands of America Grand National Championship her freshman year.
- Favorite part of her IU Marching Hundred uniform? “The uniforms have three different versions: red and white, all red, and military homage!”
- As part of her honors history degree, she’s working on a research paper about women in IU’s Marching Hundred. Of note: women weren’t allowed to join until the 1972 passage of the Title IX amendment.
What she’s into
