The First Year

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Meet Mitch Staley (’12)

Posted by Peter B. Gardner (BA ’98), Senior Editor

Hometown and High School: Dillon, Mont.; Beaverhead County High School

Applied To: BYU and BYU–Idaho

Major Plans: Business strategy

Interests and Achievements: Hunting (deer, elk, bear, duck, geese—you name it); GOP politics (founded a high school politics club and served as a vice chair of the county Republican committee); was a page in Montana’s house of representatives; AP classes in history, English, and psychology; played high school golf; has type 1 diabetes.

Plans to Bring to Provo: A cooler full of beef

Finding His Voice: A quiet fifth-grader listened intently as his teacher bemoaned the outcome of the recent presidential elections, saying George W. Bush hadn’t fairly won. She must have appreciated the boy’s rapt attention, but she couldn’t have guessed where it would lead.

Too shy to disagree, Mitch Staley nevertheless felt something ignite inside him. This spark was kindled as he considered the political world around him, including the events of Sept. 11. “In middle school I exploded,” he says. “And freshman year I was a complete tyrant.”

His fire for politics led him, as a 14-year-old, to write letter after letter to the editor of the Dillon Tribune. His determined stances elicited spirited and lengthy responses from other readers and impressed the editor, who began interviewing Mitch when he needed a viewpoint for a political story. This gave Mitch a regular voice in the paper.

At the end of his junior year, Mitch founded his school’s U.S. Politics Club. His senior year, with state and national elections cycles revving up, he invited all the candidates for state offices to a forum at his school. Most came.

His enthusiasm landed him a vice chairman position in the Beaverhead County Republican Party, for which he was the chair of publications and a speaker at many an election-year rally for state and national candidates.

Learning Religion: Coming from a part-member family, Mitch was not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ and hadn’t thought much about BYU until he was 16. That’s when his Mormon cousin and hunting partner Kevin decided to serve a mission.

Sending Kevin off at the MTC was an extended family affair, and the clan made the trek to Provo. Mitch had respected the Latter-day Saints he knew in his family and community, but the MTC was his first encounter with a large group of Church members. “You could tell that they should be admired, looked up to,” he recalls. “That was pretty overwhelming there.” The family capped their Provo visit with a trip to the bustling BYU Bookstore. “Coming [to Provo] changed everything,” he says. “I never realized [the Church] was this big, that there were this many people.”

After they returned to Dillon, Mitch’s grandparents noticed an encouraging trend—he kept stealing a copy of the Book of Mormon from their home. They worked up the courage to ask if he was interested in meeting with the missionaries. He was, and he joined the Church a month later.

As a new convert, Mitch found that BYU quickly became part of his identity—and wardrobe. “In small towns, BYU clothes are what Mormons wear,” he says. When it came time to apply for college, he had only two destinations in mind, BYU and BYU–Idaho. When the acceptance letter came, he was thrilled for reasons academic and ecclesiastical.

“I needed the religion classes to boost my [gospel] knowledge,” he says. “I needed to grow in the Church and my religion.”

1 comment:

Keeley said...

Fascinating! I'm looking forward to seeing what experiences you have at BYU. GOod luck to you. =)