Browse All Stories
32 results found
Stories by Section
Sort by Program
Year Published
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.”
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.
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?
It’s good to be back at BYU. There’s not another campus in the world that I have visited half as often as BYU. For many years, EY has been the number one employer of BYU students, and most years BYU has been the number one source of candidates for EY. It’s a wonderful two-way relationship.
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.
Suburbs may have verdant, picket-fenced lawns, but for companies seeking talent
and innovation, the grass is looking greener in the city.
What if moving halfway around the world wasn’t a grand departure into the unknown but, rather, a return to the familiar?
Ten years ago I was a stay-at-home mom raising five children. As they grew up and left the nest, I wondered how I would spend my time. I had always been busy supporting my husband’s career, living overseas, volunteering, and serving in the Church, but I had never worked in a paid position while raising my children.
“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.
Serving in the armed forces left Warren Price with deep emotional scars. He found hope in grad school and now wants to help others.
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.
Jeremy Sookhoo was looking for a meaningful career when he found impact investing.
Brian Hill's social enterprise, Edovo, is bringing meaningful education to inmates.
If the snooze button and a towering fountain drink are your morning panacea, you could be one of the millions of Americans who aren’t getting enough shut-eye. Fortunately, there is help—and it doesn’t involve another Diet Coke.
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.
No mountain is climbed in a straight line. Looking at my path between 1994, when I graduated from BYU, and where I stand today, it is certainly not a clean line.