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It’s good to be back at BYU. There’s not another campus in the world that I have visited half as often as BYU. For many years, EY has been the number one employer of BYU students, and most years BYU has been the number one source of candidates for EY. It’s a wonderful two-way relationship.
It seems like only a few years ago that I sat where you are sitting. I was an English major, and that meant that I liked reading and writing. It also meant that I had no idea what I was going to do with my career.
The Sound of Music swept the box office, Martin Luther King Jr. led thousands to Alabama’s capital, and the first commercial satellite launched into orbit. The year was 1965, and the BYU MPA students of the inaugural class were collecting their diplomas and preparing to embody the credo “Enter to learn; go forth to serve.”
It’s been twenty-five years  since BYU’s School of Management was rechristened in honor of J. Willard and Alice S.  Marriott. To celebrate the silver anniversary, seven couples recount how their time in the Tanner Building paid the ultimate dividend: a life of wedded bliss.
It’s striking that even in 2013 more than one billion people around the world live in conditions with no access to electricity. That means they have no heat for their homes and nothing to cook their food on. They do not have the ability to clean their water or to refrigerate medicines. They don’t have hospitals.
When advertisers think right, they’re right on.
I was very fortunate to attend Brigham Young University. I graduated with a master’s degree in accounting, and I’m not sure I was really aware at the time of what a great education I had received. When I entered BYU I wanted to play football, but once I began taking accounting and business classes at the Marriott School, I realized I had much better prospects in accounting. 
It wasn’t love at first sight when Mike Ward saw the fixer-upper on an overgrown lot in La Canada, a suburb of Los Angeles. But behind the weeds, worn siding, and faded paint, he saw something that intrigued him: potential.
I am truly honored and delighted to be here with you on this joyous occasion. This ceremony is called commencement because you are about to commence, or begin, the next stage in your lives. Up to this point most of what you have done is prepare.
You pull up to seven Gs in a bobsled seven times earth's gravitational pull. It's tough sledding. Fraser Bullock knows that from his experience on the bobsled track at Utah's Olympic Park. He had just signed on as CFO and COO of the Salt Lake Olympic Committee and wanted to understand what it was like to be an Olympic athlete. "I looked in the sled and there were chains, apparently to keep people from climbing out halfway down," he laughs. Bullock quickly discovered why someone might want to climb out. "It was like a monster roller coaster ride times ten," he continues. "And when you get to the bottom, you realize that the difference between gold and silver is one one-hundredth of a second. The expertise of these athletes is mind boggling."
You are a very select group whose contributions in the years ahead will be monumental. I know many of those who will be your teachers and your mentors. You are not likely to understand tonight what a rare group they are.