Larry Howell

The Lord's servants know how transformative a BYU experience can be, how profoundly a life can be shaped by the influence of our BYU faculty.

To cite just one example among scores of thousands, when Larry Howell arrived on the BYU campus in the fall of 1981, he came from a town more than ten times smaller than Kanab.

No one from his family had ever been to college, and he thought an engineer was someone who drove a train.

Forty-five years later, Larry is an internationally renowned mechanical engineer and one of the wisest and most effective leaders I have known.

Not perfect, I thought, but also not bad.

But then I thought about poor Larry Howell and posed a follow-up inquiry.

Please provide five spiritually strengthening and character-building learning outcomes for an advanced course on compliant mechanisms in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Brigham Young University.

Here's what came back, this time after five or ten seconds, because apparently the robots had to think a little harder about this one.

The Lord's servants know how transformative a BYU experience can be, how profoundly a life can be shaped by the influence of our BYU faculty.

To cite just one example among scores of thousands, when Larry Howell arrived on the BYU campus in the fall of 1981, he came from a town more than 10 times smaller than Kanab.

No one from his family had ever been to college, and he thought an engineer was someone who drove a train.

Forty-five years later, Larry is an internationally renowned mechanical engineer and one of the wisest and most effective leaders I have known.

Do you know how hard that is sometimes? One of my biggest concerns," she wrote, "about staying for a PhD was the qualifying exams.

Just prior to taking them, Dr. Larry Howell gave me a blessing.

Being able to receive a priesthood blessing from my advisor was one of the highlight experiences of attending BYU.

Every morning," she wrote of the exam week, "I went in to get words of encouragement from Dr. Howell.