Elder Dallin H. Oaks Devotional

Elder Oaks came to the BYU-Idaho campus Tuesday of last week. His address was about our religious freedoms being threatened. If you missed it, you can read the full text of his talk by clicking here. The Church also put out a news story about his devotional on the Church website's newsroom.

This is the photo that the Church used for their release and those are the flowers that our floral department does for every devotional. Make sure you watch each week for the new arrangements we provide at devotional.

A few members of our community also saw these flowers and wanted our department to do their flowers for their stake conferences! This was a great opportunity for us to show off our talents to the whole world. The devotional flowers each week are provided by the Floral Portfolio class taught by Sister Bass.

2009 Portland Rose Festival

Photo courtesy of www.oregonlive.com/rosefest/

Brother Romney, Sister Bass, Kristin Wheelwright, Shae Hunter, Christa Beaty, and Liesel Hirschi helped out Studio Concepts, a float company located in Portland, by building and designing their floats that were entered into the Portland Rose Festival. They had three days to work on the two floats. One of the floats was the largest float entered this year which was about 10-12 feet wide and 60 feet long. To prepare for this great opportunity, the students made large scale arrangements and researched the best techniques for securing them onto a float. Sister Bass said that some of the designs can be five to six feet tall! This was definitely a great chance to practice the horticulture skills we are developing and also get our name out into the world for companies in the horticulture fields. Great work guys!

A little more PLANET fever!

Here is a look back at Student Career Days, 2009. www.studentcareerdays.org



Student Career Days, sponsored by the Professional Landcare Network (PLANET) is an annual event for higher education students in landscape career programs nationwide. The 2009 event was held at Cal Poly Pomona, Pomona, CA, March 25-29, 2009. The 2010 event will be held at the North Metro Campus of Chattahoche State Technical College, Atlanta, GA.

We Are The Champions!

A sixteen member student team recently returned from Pomona, California after taking first place in a National Horticulture Competition. The Professional Landcare Network (PLANET) sponsored the 33rd annual event, which has the format of Horticulture Olympics, consisting of 25 events.
Approximately 60 schools from across the nation participated. In addition to the competition, there was a Career Fair in which the top green industry companies came to recruit and hand out scholarships.

The BYU-Idaho team was awarded $5000 for the university and captured eight individual scholarships of $1000 each, plus job offers. In addition, Eric Ball received the Presidential Scholarship for $2500, and Seth Reed received the Superstar Scholarship for $1500.

Important incidental highlights:
Seth Reed – first place in Superstar category, the student receiving the highest total points
Catherine Zimmer – First place in Cost Estimating
Eric Ball – Top Presidential Scholarship
Greg Galbraith and Kyle Steadman – first place in Paver Installation
Kyle Steadman – Mini-Excavator

Instructors Byron John and Reese Nelson are firm believers in the benefits of getting students and industry together in close proximity. This high team placement marks the third time in recent years that BYU-Idaho has captured the national title.

Here are a few more fun shots of the trip, and the competition.

And after all their hard work, what else did they have to do? Well, go to Disneyland and show off, of course! Congrats to the PLANET team for making 2009 another successful year at Career Days!