Browse All Stories
35 results found
Stories by Group
Stories by Section
Year Published
America’s Founding Fathers may have been an inspired bunch who forever changed the world, but they definitely aren’t known for diversity.
Few people can walk into a store and pick up an item off the shelf that they helped create. Jason Alleger, an MBA alumnus from the BYU Marriott School of Business, can.
While most people may see COVID-19 as a setback, Ruchika Goel, a recent BYU Marriott MBA program alum, saw the pandemic as the universe telling her to start a company.
You don’t meet a lot of people who can introduce themselves as inventors, but as the holder of sixty patents, Marty Rasmussen certainly can. He’s also a real estate developer, business manager, and “serial entrepreneur.” At age twenty-two, Rasmussen started his first venture with an objective befitting an inventor’s company: “We take ideas, develop them, put them into production, and market them on a national scale,” says Rasmussen.
When BYU Marriott MBA alum George Simons discovered the difficulty of sending legal documents through the mail, he decided to make a difference and find a better solution.
In September 2019, the Alps produced a plethora of mushrooms—more than Greg Witt has ever seen. You tend to notice things like that when you spend most of your summers hiking through the Swiss landscape.
BYU Marriott alum and former Eccles scholar Colin Ludlow created his own career opportunities and followed his passion for international business first to Japan and then to Malaysia.
Using experience and lessons from his own success, BYU Marriott EMBA alum Reed Quinn hopes that he can be a business leadership example to future entrepreneurs.
Whether she's planning cultural activities for tourists or consulting for companies in American Samoa, the path of BYU Marriott EMBA alumna Noelani Wayas has taken exciting twists and turns.
A life with challenges and opportunities has pushed BYU Marriott alumna Lisa Bateman Quist out of her comfort zone to become an advocate for women in business.
Most MBA students hope to graduate from the program with one or two prestigious internships under their belts and then begin their careers in the business field. BYU Marriott MBA alum Thayne O’Brien chose a different route. While an MBA student, O’Brien worked in Grand Teton National Park during the summers. As he neared the end of his MBA program in 1971, he realized the skills he’d learned at BYU Marriott could be used outside of the traditional business field.
Whether BYU Marriott alumna Kylie Chenn is making three pointers, writing songs, or jumping into the freezing ocean off the coast of Antarctica, she puts her whole heart into everything she does.
Growing up with a father in foreign services, Reneta Bezerra ventured far beyond her home country of Brazil. Now that she has a family of her own, she’s still on the move.
Call it a cruel but fortunate twist of fate: Dan Handy’s companies tend to undergo extreme growth when it comes time for him to hit the books. As an undergrad and a grad student at the Marriott School, the current CEO of Bluehost.com guided two internet start-ups to success, sometimes smashing against current trends with a Ping-Pong paddle.
As soon as Thaylene Lowe Rogers made her decision to return to school for an Executive MBA, she hit the GMAT prep books. During a trip to Newport Beach, California, vacation time turned into study time as she and her son began plowing through the math section. After a year of brushing up, she was in. By 2015 she’ll be sporting a new Marriott School degree on her office wall.
Randy Judd’s story begins in the Ozarks of Arkansas, where he grew up with no indoor plumbing and went to school in a two-room schoolhouse. His family’s financial situation created what he feels was a truly fortunate opportunity to work full-time during college—a path that led him to the restaurant business.
Working at the Oracle Corporation, alum Liz Wiseman found herself constantly surrounded by intelligent people. But she noticed an ebb and flow—not of intelligence but of how leaders capitalized on or closed off that intelligence. One executive she coached was brilliant but shut down others, leaving their ideas untapped. Wiseman searched for something to share with this leader about the dynamic he was caught in but found nothing. “Someone needed to research how what leaders did either diminished or multiplied the intelligence of the people around them,” Wiseman says. “This seemed like a worthy pursuit, so I just did it.”
In the winter of 1989, the snow and pine trees of Sundance Resort set the backdrop for Doug and Judith Maughan’s second date. Doug, an MBA student at the time, had asked Judith to accompany him to a Valentine’s dinner and dance sponsored by the Marriott School. “He was handsome, smart, and probably the most polite man I had ever met,” says Judith of her date. Doug was also persistent and outdoorsy—during the summers, he caught salmon in Alaska as a commercial fisherman to help pay for school. After Doug worked his charms that evening in the mountains, dates with Judith became increasingly frequent. Sharing space in the Tanner Building, where she was also a Marriott School student, helped fuel their courtship.
Pretty Govindji was always an avid viewer of the Food Network, but when her sons came into the picture, her investment in tasty meals took on new meaning. Dinnertime goals soon centered on organic cooking, and before too long, Govindji realized what she served food on might matter just as much as good fruits and veggies.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
Jamie Shaw first caught the travel bug as an MBA student at the Marriott School. She had never left the country before but decided to participate in a new business study abroad program to several Asian countries. From the first stop, she was smitten.
With wet eyelashes, Reachel walked out of her bedroom and found a stranger sitting in her apartment. The guy casually resting his elbow on the couch was Andrew, a friend of her roommates.
BYU's 2012 Entrepreneur of the Year, Brad Moss, won big at a competition hosted at the New York Stock Exchange.
Lynette Hansen has beaten the odds and exceeded expectations throughout her life, from graduating college early to surviving cancer. Now as a health care professional, she works to turn the odds in favor of the people around her.