BYU–Hawaii News

Proposals from three students to establish a first-class pay-stall restroom in a busy Hong Kong shopping district and from two Mongolian students to build an ice factory in their capital city won the business plan competition for developed and developing countries during the annual BYU-Hawaii School of Business Entrepreneurship Conference on Jan. 28.

Judges selected from among visiting entrepreneurs awarded King Lun "Kisslan" Chan, Wing Yi "Stella" Chu and Yan "Letitia" Ho a $4,000 first prize for their detailed business plan that calls for building a 22-stall pay restroom in the busy Mongkok section of Hong Kong, which has daily traffic of over 800,000 people.

Ho explained to the judges and the large crowd of BYU-Hawaii business

The chairman of the BYU Center for Entrepreneurship board of directors urged BYU-Hawaii students and faculty in the Jan. 29 devotional to consistently offer personal prayers and make personal covenants with the Lord.

"I sense your desire to be faithful, to love our Heavenly Father, to love the Savior, and to walk in obedience to their commandments," said Larry Linton, a businessman from Portland, Oregon, and a member of the President's Leadership Council of major donors to the university.

Linton, who is in Laie for the annual BYU-Hawaii entrepreneurship conference, said, "I sense your struggles to continue faithful in consistent daily prayers, consistent daily scripture reading, staying morally clean, finding your eternal companion, paying a full and completely honest tithing,

The global executive and organizational development vice president for IBM in Asia and the Pacific recently told Japanese and other BYU-Hawaii students interested in Far East careers that they should start job planning years before they graduate and take advantage of a new mentoring program.

"One of the key messages I want to give you is your education in an American university is very important in Japan," said Bradley W. Hall, the IBM executive who visited BYU-Hawaii on Jan. 26 at the invitation of the Career Services program and also as part of his calling as a high councilor in the Tokyo South Stake, where many influential business executives live.

Hall, who served a two-year mission in Hokkaido, Japan in the late 1970s for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and went on to earn a Ph.D.

Cecil O. Samuelson, President of BYU in Provo, Utah, spoke on enduring to the end and emphasized how "we must realize that what we do and how we do it is inescapably wrapped up in our individual relationship with Jesus Christ" in his Jan. 22 devotional address to the BYU-Hawaii family.

"Enduring well means that we strive to live . . . in the way that the mortal Savior did, but especially to follow His pattern in the ways that He would have us face our own unique and personal challenges," said President Samuelson, who is also a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "Having said this, for most of us, it is far easier to conceive of what enduring to the end is and why we should do it than it is to answer the basic question: Exactly how should we do it."

Keith Pierce, a local entrepreneur and president of the BYU-Hawaii 1st Stake for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, told BYU-Hawaii business students that the success of his contracting company stemmed from his reliance on the Lord and willingness to keep the commandments.

Addressing students and faculty in the first entrepreneurship lecture of 2004 in the McKay Auditorium, Pierce, who operates Pierce Construction throughout the Hawaiian Islands, emphasized specific business principles that have made his name well known locally.

Pierce explained that when he first started out, he wanted to be successful in whatever he decided to do as a career. He returned in 1986 to Laie where his extended family was living, to start his own business in contracting and

Elder Russell M. Nelson, an internationally acclaimed heart surgeon who has served as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 1984, urged 212 BYU-Hawaii Winter 2003 graduates to guard against spiritual degradation by seeking safety in the circles of family, Saints and the Savior.

"Your experience here at BYU-Hawaii is different from that of students at other institutions," Elder Nelson told the graduates in the Cannon Activities Center on December 13. "In addition to your secular studies, you have also been taught spiritual truths of eternal significance. That difference will become even more evident in the future as the gap between the world and the Church continues to widen."