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Alumni Business Management MPA 2015
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.
The Romney Institute of Public Management named Bryce Baker the 2015 N. Dale Wright Alumnus of the Year for his outstanding service in the federal government.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.