Human resource management (HRM) senior Anna Parry has a bit of an unconventional hobby: coding spreadsheets. After learning how to code Excel in class at the BYU Marriott School of Business, Parry used her skills to serve others in her mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and in her goal to earn The Congressional Award Gold Medal.
Parry served as a missionary for the Church in the Washington Everett Mission speaking Spanish. Partway through her mission, the mission president sent her and her companions to the islands of Washington (including the Whidbey, Fidalgo, and San Juan islands) with the goal of building a Spanish-speaking branch. In the beginning, Parry was met with limited success—and her mission president considered closing the area.
However, in the time she’d spent on the Washington islands, Parry had been gathering data. She made a pitch to the mission president, using the skills she learned at BYU Marriott. “I showed him my spreadsheet with my data visualizations, with the contacts that I’d had, and with the efforts that we made,” she explains. “This included a forecast of what it could look like in the future—if he would give me two more weeks.”
The mission president granted her those extra two weeks; in fact, he gave her six months. “We met the branch requirements,” Parry says. “It was a testament to me of God using our willingness, our skills, and inspiration to fulfill His work as we reach out to our communities to help people.”
After returning from her mission, Parry jumped into a new semester and took on a student job in the BYU Human Resource office. She kept track of her busy schedule through spreadsheets along with tracking her goal of 400 hours of service, 200 hours of personal development, and 200 hours of physical fitness to earn The Congressional Award from the US Congress for initiative and service.
Finishing the award’s parameters took her three years, but in June 2024, Parry stood before the senators and congresswoman from her home state of Oklahoma as she received The Congressional Award Gold Medal. Three months later, she entered the HRM junior core.
Even though she no longer needs to track service hours, Parry still serves her peers in the HRM program by helping them with their cover letters, résumés, and essays. “It’s kind of inspiring to see how the principles of what I learned over those three years apply to the HRM program; that idea of mentorship and excellence is something that I try to continue,” Parry says. “I love the idea of being a resource to others.”
Parry found an opportunity to serve as a resource to people outside of campus when she landed an international internship at Goldman Sachs. “I think my experiences at BYU equipped me perfectly for an internship anywhere, because I knew how the processes worked,” she explains. “I was given an environment during my BYU employment to have a safe space to learn—and to apply what I had learned in class.”
Parry spent her summer at Goldman Sachs in London, applying the skills she’d learned at BYU and the principles she learned through service to her work at the international institution. “BYU provides you a platform,” she says. “If you utilize the education, it can catapult you to sights that you would never dream about.”
