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Alumni Spotlight Feature MPA 2015
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.”
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.
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.