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For two years, Whitney Gustafson has both been the anchor and leader for the BYU-Hawaii Lady Seasiders softball team. The senior catcher and biology major from Utah transferred to BYUH last season from Salt Lake Community College. Immediately filling the starting catcher role, Gustafson quickly began making an impact on the softball team. “Whitney is a great leader with a lot of knowledge about the game,” said teammate Makeala Williamson, a sophomore in ICS from California. “She pushes us to play to the best of our abilities and truly believes in all of us.”Gustafson has been playing softball since she was 4. “I tried every other sport, and I felt that there was more involvement in softball, especially as a catcher,” said Gustafson. It was at the catcher position where Gustafson would find her success. “You get to see the whole field and where everyone is, and I love the feeling of throwing out a runner at second or making a sweet tag at the plate,” said Gustafson. Throughout her time at BYUH she has not only excelled at the defensive side of the game, but also on the offensive side. This year she is currently batting .355, with 3 RBI’s, and with a .387 slugging percent. Although her time here has not led to as much success as she would like in the win column, she has enjoyed being at BYUH. “Here, it is definitely about ohana. On other teams I have played on that was not always the case,” said Gustafson. “I love the family atmosphere here and that we are all friends. It is really that Hawaiian culture we feel, even though we are not all Hawaiian.” Gustafson has just a couple more weeks left in her softball career here, but she will be leaving a legacy for her teammates that will be missed. “Her character is what we will miss the most about Whitney,” said teammate Tiffany Smith, a sophomore exercise and science major from Torrance, Calif. “She raises the intensity of each game and makes sure that each teammate is ready to go.” Gustafson will graduate this Saturday, April 18, and after the softball season is over, she plans to move back to Utah with her husband. She hopes to continue to coach softball at her old high school, Bingham High School, as well as go on to pharmacy school at the University of Utah and start a family.May 21, 2015

Tupou Taufu‘i has found academic success by putting the Lord and her family first. “I can see when my life is spiritually strong, my academic life is way better,” said Taufu‘i, a graduating senior in TESOL from Tonga, “and if I’m not living the gospel, the opposite is true.”Putting the Lord first was not a new idea to Taufu‘i, who also went to Saineha High School, a LDS Church-run high school in Tonga. Her attendance there influenced Taufu‘i’s decision to attend BYU-Hawaii. “I wanted to come to BYUH because it is a church school, and I know I would do well here because it is church-oriented.”Her roommate of one year, Langiola Kioa, a sophomore from Tonga majoring in elementary education, said, “I admire her attitude. We always put church activities first. Even though we may be late sometimes, we never miss church.”Being a second-language speaker at BYUH was tough, but Taufu‘i said it helped her grow both spiritually and temporally. “Getting to know all these people from all around the world, going to classes and learning all these challenging things in class, and the gospel is everywhere. It has been a really great experience,” she said.The decision to major in TESOL came from her desire to teach English to middle school children in Tonga. “I loved English back in high school because I loved reading,” Taufu‘i said. Her teachers also had a good impact on Taufu‘i’s life, which has helped her want to positively impact the lives of other students.Before she can become a teacher, Taufu‘i needs to complete her student teaching in Tonga. “My plan is that I go back and do my student teaching. At the same time, I will put in my papers. I want to go on a mission. Then I’ll come back and further my education, and I can’t forget about temple marriage – whichever comes first,” she said.Eric Rackley, of the School of Education, was listed by Taufu‘i as one of her favorite professors. “His class was challenging, but it was worth it. He makes you think up to the point that you can’t think anymore. He made me realize I can do deep things.”Taufu‘i advised her fellow Tongan students to remember their parents and ”remember who you are and where you are from. Don’t let the life in Hawaii distract you from your purpose.” Taufu‘i said she and her parents made sacrifices for her to get a college education, like paying for school and getting a student visa.To the rest of the student body, Taufu‘i said attitude is everything. “Attitude towards your education is what matters. You may have all these assignments piling up, but what’s your attitude? Are you going to be positive, or are you going have a negative take on it?” She urged students to be spiritually minded. “When you are spiritually minded, the Lord helps things fall into place. Just put the Lord first.”Taufu‘i works as a tutor in the ELT Department. Her supervisor, Amanda Wallace, said, “She’s very positive. It’s really nice to have her as a tutor because she works to establish a good rapport with her tutees.”Uploaded May 21, 2015

Speaking at this year’s graduation ceremony is Peter Wasden, an accounting major and political science minor from Connecticut. Wasden first started at BYU-Hawaii in 2009, and since then has taken full advantage of getting to know the people around him. Cami Wasden, Peter’s wife, said, “Peter has always been a people person. He just enjoys learning and loves to help people. Being here at BYUH has only improved his capacity to interact with people and help them with what he knows.” Wasden said, “We all have our talents and we have to use those talents to serve others. We are supposed to serve others in the way we are meant to do it. We are here to specialize in a way tohelp people.” Wasden has really taken this philosophy to heart and worked to develop his talents at BYUH. Wasden started his own company, has participated in Enactus and BYUHSA, was part of the Gamers Association, worked as an accounting tutor and will graduate Summa Cum Laude. Wasden said BYUH is one of the best places to learn because of the close relationships you can create with your professors and classmates. He said, “It is incredibly unique to be able to go to your professor anytime and sit down with them in their office and get advice and be mentored. The professors here are actually your teachers and not just your lecturers.”Wasden said this has been a huge part of his success throughout his time here. “I really took the initiative to get to know my professors and look to them for help. They really do listen to you and are truly invested in you and your life,” said Wasden. Wade Che, a junior from China studying accounting, said, “For me, Peter has a passion to help people. He works hard to make sure that everyone understands the material and can be successful, even students that are not from his class.” Being around to help others and looking for opportunities to improve himself have become a fundamental part of Wasden’s life. Ben Errico, a senior from Nevada studying accounting, said, “One of Peter’s best traits is that he always is working to improve himself. Peter has great foresight that has translated into him reading good books, working hard and setting challenging goals.”Errico continued, “Peter had an easy job before he started as a T.A. for accounting. Professors and students always asked for Peter’s help and wanted him as a T.A., so he changed jobs so he could help more people. This job is more of a labor of love for Peter. He just loves to help others.”Wasden has a motto that happens to coincide with Nike’s: Just do it. He said, “You have to understand that you can do it. If I had a magic coin, I would wish everyone to just do. The world would be a better place and people would begin to realize all they can accomplish when they are doing.”Wasden will move to Idaho this summer to gain experience in the world of accounting and business. He will be working in system analysis and project management for a year to gain experience to prepare for graduate school. Uploaded May 21, 2015

Tell the people about yourselfA. “I’m from Seattle, Washington. I have 10 siblings. I am a senior graduating with a bachelor’s in arts and sciences. I majored in International Cultural Studies, with an emphasis in communications and peacebuilding. I came in with a business major, but when I got here, I felt like I needed to change. I don’t know why – just felt strongly.”Q. What do you see as the most positive things about yourself?A. “Oh now, this is the ‘conceited’ one. My top five is that I care; sometimes I care more about others than I do myself. I’m caring, friendly, inviting, I love a lot of people, and the hmm, I don’t know, we’ll just do four.”Q. What do you plan on doing after you graduate? A. “I’m not done with my education, that’s for sure. I will be here on campus till July then I am going to China to teach English till the end of the year. Then off to BYU Provo for my master’s in business, right back where I started.”Q. How has your journey been here at BYU-Hawaii, especially with the ICS major?A. “It’s taught me a lot about interpersonal communications, how to better interact with people. I feel like the peacebuilding focus has taught me how to view others as people not objects. It’s sneaky. I’ve done it before. Even treating people like they don’t matter in my life. Every person is just like me. We all have feelings and inherent value. It’s an ongoing process.”I agree. Growing is definitely a process of unlearning and checking yourself. A. “Definitely. It’s an ongoing process of relearning, and reinventing, reiterating, reliving.”Not forgetting the things we reinforce should be positive habits... A. “Yeah it’s easy to get comfortable because the campus is so small. We shouldn’t get too comfortable to the point where we are missing all the opportunities our surroundings have to offer. Again, it’s redoing, reliving, re… cycle, reuse, GO GREEN!”Q. What has been the highlight of your time at BYUH?A. “Definitely Culture Night. I had the amazing opportunity to host last year’s event and really became aware of the importance of your audience. You have no idea who they are, and yet you have to make them your main focus and make it alive. I met most of my friends at Culture Night. It’s such a big event for our campus and our community, and that’s a big thing with Envision La‘ie and all these things. It was great to be a part of that unifying event.”Q. What is your aspiration?A. “That’s a big question, and it’s always a process of rethinking – here we are back at the ‘re’ process. You have to become comfortable with yourself and say, ‘I accept the things that are going on around me, why I’m here, and what am I doing.’ Taking into consideration of where I come from and where I am now, I think I’m just going to say, my aspiration in life is to be happy.”Definitely.A. “Once you do that, once you are happy, you are happy for no reason but yourself. You are doing things for yourself. It’s not selfish or conceited though. It’s allowing yourself to be proud of where you have come from and where you are now and where you can go in the future, and recognizing the power you have to make things happen for yourself. No one’s going to do it for you. People think that if you’re proud of yourself and accepting of yourself, they look at it like you’re being conceited. No, that’s allowing yourself to be proud of the work you are doing for yourself. The main thing you need to worry about is your family and those close to you. You’re always going to have haters.”Q. When you leave BYUH, what do you want to leave behind?A. “My motto right now is #IWasHere. Let people know that you were here. People that I’m close with know they can call me at any time and I will come through for them no matter what.” Q. Do you have any shoutouts?A. “Well, shoutout to my friends, you, and all my home dawgs. It’s been great fun. I don’t know where I would be without my academic advisor, Rowena Reid. We need more people like her. Tammy Fonoimoana. All the people who helped me get to this point. Shoutout to all of you.”Q. Last question: How do you, Tonga, deal with the haters?A. “I don’t.”Uploaded May 21, 2015

Terainui Johnston found her love of serving people and rekindled her dancing talent in Hawaii. Johnston, a senior graduating with a degree in social work from Tahiti, said, “The more I learned about social work, the more I felt that this is for me because I love serving people. I just love it. It has kind of opened my vision and perception of my life.” Throughout the classes she has taken at BYU-Hawaii, the most influential ones for her have been all of her social work classes. She explained through experiencing them, “Life became larger. The fact that there are so many things that are given to us that we take for granted, and when I see people out there who don’t have what I have, I feel that I need to do something. It also helps me to be more grateful for what I have.” Her opportunities to do service at BYUH are among the highlights of her time here. Johnston shared, “A few of my favorite moments are probably the service projects that the school had or even New Student Orientation (NSO) where we have to be there for the new students.”After returning home from her mission on Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah, she said she was unsure about coming to BYUH in the beginning, aiming instead to go to Canada or New Zealand. “But for some reason, I had to come here, and I gave myself six months and if I don’t see why I am here, then I will just go home. But what truly helped me to find my place here is serving others.”Called as a Relief Society president, she said she would find someone to help in her free time because “I felt like I just needed to go do something for people. That stage of my life really helped me to be more humble and even though I don’t understand everything there is always something. I always tell myself, ‘You cannot do everything for everyone everywhere but you can do something for someone somewhere.’” Johnston said even if it is the smallest way of serving, like just listening to someone, she will do it.Johnston started learning Tahitian dance when she was 4 years old. “My parents, for some reason, saw that I had an interest for dancing. They signed me up in a group, but I had to stop because of health problems. I got back into it when I came here and it was hard.” Johnston has displayed her talent of Tahitian dancing at both the Polynesian Cultural Center and in BYUH’s Culture Night.Johnston said her heart is full of gratitude as she looks back on her years at BYUH. “What has truly made my college life the best and what has truly made me happy is service. I just want to encourage all of us to stop complaining. There’s always something to be grateful for, and one of them is the ability and opportunity to cheer someone up and make them smile.”Some of Johnston’s future plans are to volunteer at the Humanitarian Center in Asia and other non-profit organizations. She also hopes to work with a famous French baker in the next 10 to 15 years because she counts baking as one of her hobbies, along with photography. Her advice to the future graduates is to “always be grateful, and if you make the Lord your priority, he will make you His priority.”Uploaded on May 20, 2015

BYU–Hawaii’s Enactus team took home top honors being named the U.S. National Champions and receiving a $10,000 prize on April 16 at the annual competition held this year in St. Louis, Missouri. After being among the national finalists the last several years, coming in first place this year BYUH team will move on to compete along with 35 other countries at the World Cup Competition Oct. 14-16 in Johannesburg, South Africa.BYUH’s Enactus team “created projects empowering residents of the Ivory Coast, the home country of Sery Kone, one of its members,” says a press release about the win. “The team inspired women to become entrepreneurs through micro-financing and taught cacao farmers to pollinate crops through beekeeping to increase their production and income.”It continues, “Top executives from America’s most well-known companies including The Hershey Company, The Coca Cola Company, The Schwan Food Company and Unilever, local notables Edward Jones, Enterprise Holdings, KPMG and Walmart, and nearly 100 more gathered to judge entrepreneurial outreach projects created and implemented by Enactus teams from 178 colleges and universities, as well as network and engage with the more than 2,400 students attending from around the country.”Enactus is “part of an international non-profit organization that brings together student, academic and business leaders who are committed to improving the world through entrepreneurial action,” it says. “Guided by business experts and academic advisors at 1,700 universities in 36 countries, the 70,500 student leaders of Enactus create and implement entrepreneurial projects each year impacting more than 1,950,000 people.”Mike Moore, EVP and president, Small Formats Walmart U.S., Walmart Stores, Inc. and chairman of Enactus United States National Advisory Board, said, “Our commitment to Enactus teams worldwide underscores our belief that these talented and dedicated students are making a significant impact on the livelihoods of people in communities around the world. Not only are they doing the right thing for their communities, [but also] they are gaining highly sought-after skills and attitudes that shape our next generation of great leaders.”BYUH’s Enactus team took part in the three-day competition making live multimedia presentations describing its projects “to panels of business leaders in an effort to convince them that they have created a sustainable impact economically, socially or environmentally,” the information says. Students also “interviewed for jobs and internships at a two-day Career Fair where recruiters competed aggressively from this extraordinary pool of talent and in many cases offered jobs on the spot.”Alex Perwich, the president of Enactus United States, said, “The accomplishments of the Brigham Young University–Hawaii team, the 177 other teams that competed this week, and hundreds of other active Enactus teams around the country underscore the fact that participation in Enactus provides university students with the opportunity to make a meaningful difference in their communities, while gaining the experience, skills and contacts necessary to build a successful career.” The other teams placing in the top four were:2nd: La Sierra University (Riverside, Calif.)3rd: John Brown University (Siloam Springs, Ark.)4th: Belmont University (Nashville, Tenn.)

It is normal for universities around the country to offer a wide variety of classes that are unique to that campus, and BYU-Hawaii is no exception. Due to its unique location and staff, the university offers a variety of courses that might not be found in other universities. These classes, however, sometimes fall beyond the radar of some students, making them hidden gems. Here are just a few of the unique classes offered on this campus, classes that are unique, interesting and fun.Exercise and sports classes:The university offers a wide variety of fun exercise and sport classes. This includes some of the usual team sports such as: soccer, basketball, and volleyball, but there are also some classes for individual sports such as: golf, racquetball, and tennis. But then there are also a few classes that one might not find on another campus, such as: surfing and touch rugby. Senior exercise and sports science major McKenzie Evans, from Utah, took the touch rugby class because she “thought it would be fun to play rugby with some Polynesians who knew the game.” At the end of the semester Evans found herself more than satisfied with her experience and spoke highly of the class, “I would for sure recommend this class to others. Brother Mahoni is a great teacher. You get to learn and play rugby every morning, and most importantly it is way fun.”History of Surfing:The class, history of surfing, taught by Doctor Isaiah Walker during the summer semester, is not your regular history class. “It was informal but informative. We watched surf flicks and went surfing, but we also read about Hawaiian legends and places and events in Hawaiian history,” said senior English major Alyssa Walhood, from Oregon. “It was an amazing class that more people should take in order to learn about Hawaii, understand the history of their white privilege, and gain more respect for the people and spirit of Hawaii.”Terrorism:Taught by Doctor Brian Houghton usually during the winter semester, this class is for sure a different class from the other political science classes. The class teaches the history and types of terrorism and the conflicts surrounding it. Probably the most exciting and unique thing about the class is that as a final project, students are grouped together and assigned to create and plan a terrorist attack of their own. For those of you hoping to expand your knowledge and take a different sort of class, this one is a great option.Uploaded April 3, 2015

Being engaged for three years may seem like a challenge, but for Lee Phillips, a senior in Pacific Island studies from New Zealand, the wait has been worth it because it has allowed her to complete her education. She will graduate in June and on Aug. 8 she will marry her sweetheart and fiancé of three years in the New Zealand Temple. Speaking of their time apart, Phillips said, “I just needed to do this to be able to live a good life. I was thinking of all of us. It was for my fiancé, me, and my family.” For Phillips and her family, education is atop priority. “It was always just my mom, my older sister and I, and neither of them had the opportunity to go to college. They always knew that I would be the one who could get an education at the university,” said Phillips.Phillips met her fiancé, Donny Ngwun, in New Zealand after she finished high school. They dated for some time while she was attending a university in New Zealand. She said things were going well, but she always felt BYU-Hawaii was where she belonged. She said her sister constantly reminded her of that. After Phillips’ older sister had visited the BYUH campus, she knew that was where Lee needed to go. Phillips said, “She came home and just had a feeling that I needed to go to BYUH. So after we got engaged it was difficult for her. She thought I was hurting myself and the opportunities I could have at BYUH.” Phillips, her fiancé, and her sister made a compromise. She would go to BYUH, but only after she was engaged. So, Phillips was engaged in August and left for Hawaii that same month. Phillips said coming to a new country and school was very difficult, especially atthe beginning. She said she and her fiancé called each other on Skype and the phone, and she said having a common purpose and goal made it work. They have seen each other in person only three times since she has come to Hawaii. She said, “The love that we have for each other has bloomed into something so strong nothing could break it, and nothing ever has. The love that we have is a diamond in the rough – rare, unheard of in days like these – but it’s there. You just have to look for it.”Lily Tarawa, one of Phillips’ best friends who helped her along her journey, said, “I feel that her experience has helped her realize the great amount of potential that she has as a future advocate, teacher and leader. Lee is headstrong, determined, vivacious and empowering and I am grateful for our friendship. I feel she made the right decision because she followed the basic steps of prayer, fasting and seeking guidance from the Lord. Because the Lord was involved in this decision for her to come to school and be away from her family and fiancé for three years, she excelled in both areas of education and eternal perspective.”Phillips said, “I wouldn’t change it. Being by yourself here you learn a lot about who you are and I was able to grow so much independently. I have had both temporal and spiritual blessing from being here and it has helped me to mature. These experiences will prepare me to better help my family.”Uploaded April 2, 2015.