Mike Foley

Richard W. Clark — an attorney from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and a member the President's Advisory Council for the BYU-Hawaii School of Business — fanned interest in this week's upcoming entrepreneurship conference by sharing lessons he's learned from other entrepreneurs and from starting his own businesses.

Two major speakers, 20 free panel discussions on a wide range of topics and over 50 visiting entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, who will judge the business plan competition finalists, highlight the eighth annual Mark and Laura Willes Center for International Entrepreneurship conference at BYU-Hawaii from February 8-10, 2006. The theme of this year's conference, most of which is free and open to the public, is "Entrepreneurship: Empowering Students Worldwide."

As a special traveling exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls opened in the Laie Temple Visitors Center on January 19, BYU-Hawaii students, faculty, staff and visitors filled the McKay Auditorium to capacity to hear Dr. Donald W. Parry, BYU Associate Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature and a member of an international team of translators working on the 2,000-year-old records, explain their significance to Latter-day Saints.

President Eric B. Shumway used his remarks at the December 15 graduation luau and a thank you letter from former university president Alton Wade to comment on BYU-Hawaii's year-long Golden Jubilee celebration, which drew to a close with the December 17 commencement.

Mike Foley | University Advancement | 19 December 2005 In his December 17 commencement address to over 250 BYU-Hawaii graduates, Elder Boyd K. Packer, Acting President of The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, used some of his own experiences in the Pacific 60 years ago to emphasize the increasing need for personal revelation in modern times.

Elder Packer, who was ordained an Apostle on April 9, 1970, told the graduates he was serving in the military when he originally stopped in Laie 60 years ago to see the temple. The next day in Honolulu he learned World War II had ended and hoped that he would soon be going home, "but that was not to be."

A 33-year-old Texas man told BYU-Hawaii students in the November 29 EntrepreneurshipLecture Series how he started his own version of the family armored vehicle business after BYU in Provo turned him down for admission three times.

Mike Foley | University Advancement | 16 November 2005 A BYU-Hawaii organizational behavior graduate and his mentor/professor, who have recently formed a corporate training company together, encouraged those in the November 15 Student Alumni Association meeting to follow the leadership example of Ammon in the Book of Mormon to achieve great success.

Before turning to the Book of Mormon, Art Hannemann ('82) related how he dropped out of high school in California and moved to Laie to live with his sister so he could surf. "I was surfing 'second break' and had been out in the water for about two-and-a-half hours, and for the first time in my life everything opened up to me. I was filled with emotion and gratitude. When I got to my sister's house, I remember kneeling by my bed and praying, crying for everything that I'd been blessed with."

Mike Foley | University Advancement | 8 November 2005 BYU-Hawaii business students and others interested in competing in the university's annual business plan competition went into a more serious mode of preparation with the November 8 entrepreneurship lecture on how to determine if an idea will make a good business opportunity.

Dr. Gregory V. Gibson, director of the Mark and Laura Willis Center for International Entrepreneurship at BYU-Hawaii, described the lecture as a "kickoff to the business plan competition," and added that this year there will be "a lot more prizes and a lot more mentors involved."

A small business owner told BYU-Hawaii students in the November 1 entrepreneurship lecture series how she uses her retail shop to share the gospel: