Rise and Shout!

BYU officially notified applicants of their acceptance status on Friday. Mark is officially in! He is pretty excited, as are we. We weren't too worried about him getting in, but it's always nice to know for sure. They don't release scholarship information for another month or so, so we don't know about that yet. Here's hopin'.

In typical Mark fashion, he knew for about six hours before he told us. He found out just as he was getting ready to go to work. Marsha wasn't home and Mark didn't have time to come find me in the basement to tell me. He was working and we had gone to some friends' house for dinner, games and a movie. Mark was home when we got home, but he still didn't tell us. We had a voice mail from a friend congratulating Mark on getting in to BYU. Marsha and I stormed the piano room (where Mark was playing) to ask him if he had something he wanted to tell us. He sheepishly told us the news. He said that he didn't text us because he wanted to tell us in person, but by the time we got home it was old news.

We had to kid him that we probably wouldn't find out about his mission call for three weeks and his engagement for over a month.

Mark is pretty sure that he is going to BYU. He has scholarships offers to attend other schools, but he really wants to participate in the BYU flagship program. According to the BYU flagship website, "The mission of the Chinese Flagship Center is to create global professionals who can function culturally and linguistically in the professional Chinese world."

In a nutshell, you study your major classes in Chinese. After three years, you spend a year in China at Nanjing University and have an internship in China. Mark is pretty excited to be involved in it.

In addition to his BYU news this week, Mark also had his Sterling Scholarship interview this week. Each school in a Utah region can nominate one sterling scholar in science, math, music, foreign language, computer technology, business, speech/drama, visual arts, social science, english.

Mark was his school's nominee for Science.

To see a newspaper article about the nominees, click on this link. The Lehi Sterling Scholars are in photo 8 of 19 accompanying the story.

Mark did not advance to the next round. We thought he would have been able to advance in music or foreign language, but it was not to be. We are very proud of Mark for his accomplishments. He's a great kid!