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Alumni Spotlight Feature 2010–2014
The Marriott family is particular about what they attach their name to. Marriott believes that young people with good values and strong character will be the essence of business success in the future.
Coming up with the tagline "Marriott 25" was simple. But the task—twenty-five thousand hours of service—was Monumental. With a capital M.
A word of advice to the newest graduates of the School of Accountancy: learn to take a good ribbing—because while you may have just earned a coveted degree from a top-ranked accounting program, you’ve also just entered one of the world’s most-stereotyped professions.
Around the world, young social entrepreneurs are leading the way, rewriting the rules, and changing the world. It pays to do good.
We have a son who is studying at the Marriott School. When he was about three years old, our family was living in the Governor’s Residence in Salt Lake City.
Sam sits to your left, but you know him as “the doomsayer.” With each new project, he prophesies epic failure and marks every email urgent—including the one about not microwaving strong-smelling food in the break room.
The Utah Governor’s Mansion was blanketed in soft, blue light. The occasion was World Autism Awareness Day 2014, and buildings across the country were swapping bulbs to highlight a disorder that affects one in sixty-eight American children.
Curtis Bedont thought he knew what it meant to be in the military. Though he spent his formative years on bases in foreign outposts, his fighter-pilot father never faced deployment.
I keenly remember sitting in my basement apartment in Utah and reviewing with my wife our meager student finances. Given the recent birth of our first son and my heavy academic load, I could only afford to work part time. Even with our combined efforts, money was very tight for my wife and me. We were incredibly grateful for the low tuition, the scholarships, and the financial aid which allowed me to receive such an outstanding degree, and we committed to someday give back what had generously been given to us.
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.
Fifty-six years and 1.3 million birthday parties may seem impossible, but it sums up John Huish’s career. He’s had a hand in facilitating cake-and-candle celebrations across five states and has provided jobs for more than one hundred thousand people.
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. 
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.
Service must be the primary focus of those who seek a generous heart and blessed life, writes Sonia Clayton.
Alum Mirella Petersen is bold, organized, and driven—the perfect combination for getting autism insurance reform passed in Utah.
When Jackie Saumweber joined the BYU MPA program, she didn't know she would find her niche in corporate social responsibility.
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.”
It only took five seconds for Ryan Judkins’s boss to approve his beard plan. Surprised, Judkins, a sales representative for Callaway Golf and a normally clean-cut guy, asked, “You do realize I might have a beard that’s five, six, or seven inches long at one point?”
When comedian Jim Gaffigan takes his young brood on vacation, it’s usually in a giant tour bus between stops on his North American touring circuit. The sleep-deprived father of five, with kids ages one through eight, is best known for his riffs on iconic American food products. But these days it’s his daily observations on parenting that draw the biggest laughs.