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Alumni Spotlight Business Management Experience Design
BYU Marriott alum Alena J. Turner quite literally bends over backward to help others. The 2013 therapeutic recreation graduate has influenced many children—including her own—during her successful career as a gymnastics coach.
A BYU Marriott alum combines work and play as she teaches patients how to recover from addiction through mountain biking, canoeing, and rock climbing.
A strong relationship with the Savior and a keen sense of humor have helped Kris Belcher through the hardest trials of her life.
Everyone has a story to tell. Personal stories are shared on social media and news outlets every day. But what about those whose voices are not heard?
Jonathan DeGraff is quick to point out that his time in the Tanner Building not only gave him a great education but also left him with a strong desire to serve.
Making use of her well-honed business chops, this 1976 BYU Marriott grad has spent retirement focused on improving her community—one creative solution at a time.
Jennifer Rockwood stepped onto BYU’s South Field and gazed numbly across the green turf. “What have I gotten myself into?” she recalls thinking. “Can I really do this?”
Elizabeth Smith loves her job as an executive assistant for Larry H. Miller Sports & Entertainment (LHMSE).
Life after graduation has taken them 1,700 miles apart. But drawing on their business savvy, these sisters have found a way to stay close by running The DIY Lighthouse.
Kim Borup knows a good investment when she sees one.
Warren Price is about to step in waist-high water in the middle of the Provo River when a bull moose saunters up the pedestrian bridge thirty yards to the south.
Working as an attorney at one of the oldest firms in New York City, Chandler Tanner finally understood what the classic rock band Loverboy meant when they sang “Working for the Weekend.”
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.
Serving in the armed forces left Warren Price with deep emotional scars. He found hope in grad school and now wants to help others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?”
In the area of market research, Cathy Chamberlain is a one-woman political powerhouse. Her influence, as well as the results of her studies, has been spread across the country from Washington, DC, back to the West Coast, and overseas as well. Since graduating from BYU in 1973 with a degree in business education, she’s tallied up more than thirty years of experience in market research and is still going strong.