A Message from Dean David Magleby-Celebrating Accomplishment

April is a month on campus when we celebrate student accomplishment. Graduation will again see large numbers of our students having completed degrees and moving on to new opportunities; nearly one quarter of all BYU graduates are from our college. In a few days family members and friends will return to campus to recognize and applaud their friend or family member on this milestone. As faculty and staff of the college, we share in the pride of completing a college degree. This April, for the fourth consecutive year, the college is hosting the Mary Lou Fulton Mentored Student Research Conference where over 300 students are presenting over 170 posters. These posters summarize research the students have done in a mentored relationship with a faculty member. It is exciting to see the students explain what they studied and learned to faculty, staff and other students.

Marjorie Pay Hinckley Lecture: Strengthening the Religious Teen

Strengthening the religious teens requires basic commitment, intent, and adults taking interests in their lives, says Dr. Christian Smith of the University of Notre Dame. Smith, a professor of Sociology at Notre Dame and Principal Investigator of the National Study of Youth and Religion, was the main speaker at the Fourth Annual Lecture of the Marjorie Pay Hinckley Endowed Chair in Social Work and the Social Sciences held on February 7th in the JSB auditorium on BYU campus. Smith drew from past and current national studies he was conducting to speak on Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. His main message was that young people care more about religion than the current media stereotype advertises.

Third BYU Student in 4 Years Wins Prestigious Gates Scholarship

Growing up in a town of 234 people in rural Idaho, Tara Westover barely considered attending college, let alone envisioned that one day she would be headed to the University of Cambridge for postgraduate studies with a prestigious scholarship worth more than $37,000. Westover, 21, and a Brigham Young University senior majoring in history, was recently named one of 45 U.S. college students to receive the highly competitive Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She is the third BYU student to receive the award since 2004. Four of this year's recipients come from Harvard, two each from Yale and Princeton and one from Stanford.

Professor Says Digital Earth is Almost Here, but Not Quite

Keith Clarke is a cartographer from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He, like many other geographers, wants to map the world... in a way that no one has ever before. Clarke was the main speaker at a lecture held by the BYU Geography department Thursday, February 21, where he spoke on a concept first introduced by Vice President Al Gore while he was giving a speech at the California Science Center in Los Angeles back in 1998. His topic was on the integration of multi media elements and cutting-edge technology into an all-in-one project named Digital Earth. Clarke said that geography has always been considered a library of facts about the world in which we live, constantly being updated as the day's technology improves. The integration of geography with modern elements such as cross-scale considerations of variation in space over time, various information tools, and integrative and synthetic (e.g. map vs. atlas) tools, is necessary to keep its usefulness to the masses.

Research Shows Parents Still Influence Their College Kids

New research from Brigham Young University shows that parents influence their child’s likelihood of involvement with drugs, alcohol and risky sexual activity even after their child leaves for college. In an upcoming issue of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, family scientist Laura Walker’s study found that parents’ knowledge or awareness of what’s going on in their child’s life at college is associated with fewer risky behaviors. Specifically, students who said their fathers were in the loop had a lower likelihood of doing drugs or engaging in risky sexual behaviors. When mothers were in the know, students were less likely to drink alcohol.

Washington Seminar- Fall 2007 Overview

Washington Seminar at Brigham Young University had another successful fall 2007 semester, with it twenty-nine well qualified student interns. As a campus-wide internship program, the Washington Seminar helps to place students in a variety of internships in Washington, D.C.Washington Seminar student interns worked in all three branches of the U.S. government, for elected officials in both the Democratic and the Republican parties, and in numerous non-profit and for-profit enterprises in the private sector during the fall 2007 semester.

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