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Alumni Classroom 2015
It reads like a worst-case scenario: you’re slicing through rough air to check on an offshore oil rig when the unfathomable happens—the chopper goes down. Would you survive?
Sickness, car wrecks, and births—INTEX, the weeklong rite of passage for information systems students, stops for nothing.
Playing the part of butcher Lazar Wolf in Fiddler on the Roof came naturally to 1983 MPA alum Chris Miasnik: his last name is made up of the Russian occupational suffix and the word for meat. But there were a few other factors involved in landing the role of rejected suitor in the Bluffdale Arts Council production. “I was the oldest guy there, and I had the whitest beard,” he admits.
Jolene Day Weston’s two children can practically ski circles around her, even though they’re only three and a half. Her career path and journey to motherhood have taken a similar circuitous course.
By gaining the ear of the Canadian government, alum Ken Kyle helped snuff out the light of tobacco companies in his home country. And the effects of his work are still filtering across the world.
When Pat Harmer Bluth expressed an interest in mathematics and engineering, her brother responded, “Girls don’t major in math.”
Noemi Morales, a native of Roswell, Georgia, started out as a photography major at BYU-Idaho. Although it took her a few years in Rexburg, an LDS mission to St. George, Utah; and lots of decisions, Morales has finally found her calling in the Marriott School’s recreation management program. She’s even landed an internship with a popular new company called Slide the City that puts on giant waterslide events across the country.
What if moving halfway around the world wasn’t a grand departure into the unknown but, rather, a return to the familiar?
After a long day at work you come home, put up your feet, and dish out your daily complaints on Twitter.
“Deciding to be a full-time mom over working full-time is the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make,” says Marie Nielson Canaday. In fact, it’s a decision she still struggles with. While tending to two active boys keeps her very busy, Canaday is nurturing both her sons and her thriving love of all things business.
In 1980 finance alum Ryan Tibbitts was one year away from graduating, but it wasn’t the textbooks he was hitting hard. Tibbitts was gearing up, along with the rest of the BYU football team, to take on Southern Methodist University—a showdown now immortalized in Tibbitts’s new book, Hail Mary: The Inside Story of BYU’s 1980 Miracle Bowl Comeback.
When Terisa Poulsen Gabrielsen finished her business management degree, the year was 1982 and the economy was bleak. Though she was determined to enter the business world, her best offer was a job teaching accounting at Salt Lake Community College. There, Gabrielsen discovered an unexpected love for teaching that kept her at the school for the next twenty-five years. Despite that love, she realized she had a job rather than a career. That realization became a turning point that would take her to the University of Utah, then to the streets of Philadelphia, and back to a BYU classroom.
Model rockets, toys, and board games. This isn’t a child’s wish list; it’s Myles Christensen’s résumé. The 2001 MBA grad and design engineer recently added one more fun item to his line-up—electric bikes. He’s connecting customers with electric bicycles and making many people happy in the process.
While most students were simply juggling textbooks, 2013 Marriott School grad Bradley Robins was also singing and dancing around the world with the BYU Young Ambassadors. But this Saturday Robins will light up a venue a little closer to home: LaVell Edwards Stadium.
Being a soldier in the armed forces can be physically and emotionally demanding. As an army chaplain, MPA alum Lt. Col. Thomas Helms has been offering soldiers moral support and religious services for nearly two decades.
MPA student Jeff Roberts discovered many things during his internship: the best ways to help people become self-reliant, his love of social innovation, and the power of a late-night pizza party.
Brian Hill's social enterprise, Edovo, is bringing meaningful education to inmates.
It started out as a nutty idea, says Jeff Wilks, director of the School of Accountancy. How could students really dive into the topics that current accounting professionals are dealing with?
The roar of more than thirty thousand screaming fans had just been swallowed by an avalanche of noise from an F-22 Raptor and an F-15 fighter jet streaking overhead.
What does Matt McGhee say most prepared him to thrive in his dream job at a multinational tech giant? Participating in his LDS young single adult ward activity committees—planning dances and mix-and-mingles.
It was 6:30 p.m., and Dora Ho-Ellis was still in her office. “Normally, I’m not that hardworking,” she quips. But when the phone rang with a pivotal opportunity for the entrepreneurship education program she spearheaded at Singapore Polytechnic, she was grateful she was there to answer.
Doug Jackson is bringing sight to tens of thousands around the globe—thanks to a new kind of vision for humanitarian work.
Switching from a degree in accounting and a career in software engineering to life as a full-time artist is strange, admits Karl Hale. But when his after-work detox projects turned out to be works of art, that’s exactly the leap he took.
Three days. Four major events. More than 200 attendees.