Riara Kazm was born in Ig'jara, a rural community outside Laikan, the capital city of Andoria. Her parents, both exobotanists from Trill, immigrated to the ice world five years before her birth to help the Andorian Agricultural Ministry stop the fungal infestation of Andorian tuber roots, one of the only crops that grows within the vast permafrost. Having adapted well to both the community and environment, the Kazms became long-term residents of Andoria and were still working in Ig'jara as of 2367.
Riara expressed an early interest in aeronautics, and the Kazms' frequent excursions to the Ag Ministry's hangars on the planet's surface gave her many opportunities to watch aerocraft in action. When she was sixteen, Riara received her pilot's license from the local flight school. The next year, she helped the Ag Ministry engineers refurbish a dilapidated aeroseeder. Upon turning eighteen, Riara considered joining the Ag Ministry and continuing to work with her parents, but realized that doing so would limit her flying to Andoria's short summer growing season.
Eager to fly higher than her sub-orbital license would allow, Riara applied to Starfleet Academy and was accepted into their aviation program. Living in the multicultural Earthen hub of San Francisco offered Riara more than a formal education, as for the first time in her life, Riara didn't feel she stood out more than anyone else. She developed a reputation for being unassumingly bold and blunt, and earned the respect of the other cadet pilots by using unconventional problem solving techniques (once, while taking an experimental shuttle out on a test flight, Riara prevented the engine from overcycling by ejecting it into the vacuum of space and letting it cool before fixing it and returning it to the base; another time, when her squadron discovered an adolescent astrocetacean stranded in a gravity well, Riara guided the creature to safety using Andorian jazz music played through a plasma wave converter).
