I went there for one semester as well. That’s how long it took me to realize that BYU-Provo Campus is not a university. It is a giant slumber party masquerading as a university. They want everyone to be basically homogenous – look the same, dress, think the same, act the same. The Honor Code was created for that purpose.
The question is why? Well, the answer is, the “school” exists to get LDS kids married to other LDS kids. That’s why they have a bias towards LDS kids from other states/countries. The church knows that those kids don’t have a lot of options for marriage to another LDS person if they go to school close to home, so they created the BYU system as a way to gather LDS kids from places where they are a minority and put them all together. It’s just a giant episode of The Batchelor with LDS kids. Education is of secondary importance. The BYU schools’ first goal is to ensure LDS kids marry other LDS kids, thereby increasing the odds that their families and children will continue on in the church.
I saw a lot of strange behavior there, and I don’t mean the kind of strange behavior you see at other universities. Things like, girls spending hours baking cookies for the boys in the ward. And boys posting flyers with what mission they went to, what their current calling is, and their phone number. It’s like…a giant mass speed dating service.
I have a theory that this is why you see so many BYU-Provo Campus grads do these weird, ill-conceived startups straight out of school. They graduate with a wife (and maybe even kids), but without a solid education or much common sense. They often don’t have a lot of prospects to get a real job, but they do have a lot of pressure to provide for their young families. So they start their own businesses, often selling some kind of wacky, odd, or provincial (i.e. caters to Mormons) product or service. They usually fail, but the rare one will succeed spectacularly (see Ryan Smith).
It’s definitely a strange place and turns out some pretty strange people.
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