A Love Letter to Brigham Young University
I did not know when I arrived at BYU how much the place would shape me.
At the time, I was simply going to school. I was figuring out what I believed, what I was interested in, and what kind of life I wanted to build. Like most students, I probably thought I was there to earn a degree. Looking back, the degree was only part of what I received.
BYU gave me a place to grow up.
It gave me professors who took ideas seriously and expected me to do the same. It gave me the chance to study Korean, something that would become a meaningful part of my life and eventually take me halfway around the world. It taught me that education can change the trajectory of a person’s life in ways that are difficult to see while you are living them.
It also gave me relationships, experiences, mistakes, questions, and opportunities that became part of the foundation I carried into adulthood.
My relationship with the institution has changed over the years. So have I.
There are things I see differently now than I did when I was a student, and I think that is probably part of what a meaningful relationship with a university should allow. The places that make us do not have to remain frozen in our memory for us to care deeply about what they gave us.
What I appreciate most now is that BYU helped introduce me to the power of higher education itself.
I have spent most of my career working in universities, and somewhere underneath that career is still the student who discovered that a campus can be much more than classrooms and buildings.
It can be a place where people encounter ideas, people, and possibilities that change what they believe is possible for their lives.
That is why I care about BYU.
Not because it was perfect. Not because my relationship with it has always been simple. But because it was one of the places that made me.
And I think places like that are worth remembering, protecting, challenging, improving, and loving.
Brett Eden, Brigham Young University ‘01
#LoveLettersToThePlacesThatMadeUs
