By Brittany Rogers
Image above courtesy BYU–Idaho
From the court to the classroom, Alisha Stratton had unparalleled mentoring and leadership opportunities at BYU–Idaho.
With a dad who worked at IBM, Alisha Stratton’s family had a home computer earlier than most. At age 12, she took it apart.
“It was an old IBM PC DOS,” says Stratton. “I literally just opened up the box and started tweaking.”
And then Dad got home.
“What are you doing?!” she recalls him crying out—he didn’t know how to put it back together. “He worked in sales,” she says. So Stratton reassembled it, finishing with just a few homeless parts. “It still worked!” she says.
Now graduated from BYU–Idaho in computer information technology, Stratton is extending that kind of experience of discovery to thousands of kids. Stratton—who rose from college hire to executive in 10 years—is director of application development at USAA. There, she created and launched an annual program called KIDternship, inviting youngsters into USAA offices for a day of coding, cyber-security, and—yes—building PCs from parts.
“The coolest thing about it,” she says, is that last year USAA hired a KIDternship alum. What’s more, says Stratton, it was a woman.
IT is a predominantly male field, as was her major. “The class I graduated in, there were four females,” says Stratton, who is teaming up with BYU–Idaho faculty to encourage more young women to choose STEM. But that’s not all.
She’s back on campus in Rexburg several times a year to recruit for USAA, to speak to students, and to help keep the computer science department on the cutting edge.
“[The] field is constantly and rapidly changing,” says her former professor Lee Barney. To ensure BYU–Idaho students shine, Barney invited Stratton to join a team who interviewed grad schools and employers nationwide about the most-needed IT skills. The overhauled program now leans hard into machine learning, he says, giving students problems like “How would you write Amazon?”—as in the backend of the web app.
It’s an example of what Stratton loves most about BYU–Idaho: the dedicated faculty. “Brother Barney is well known in the industry,” says Stratton. Of all the paths his career could take, “he chooses to be here,” she says.
Staff and administrators share that dedication. With a laugh, Stratton tells of an advisor’s kind but direct critique in a résumé review: “On paper, I looked like a person without a personality,” she says. Subsequently adding a graphic design cluster of courses changed her trajectory. “I feel like I’m more of a unicorn in my field,” she says—someone with the technical skills to code and the creative skill to design. It’s the perfect combination for creating user-centric applications.
Her most memorable college mentor, however, was campus sports coordinator Trent Shippen. In terms of athletics, there may not be another university in the country that parallels BYU–Idaho’s offerings. BYU–Idaho does not have collegiate-level sports; instead, the school sponsors competitive student leagues. There are tryouts and drafts, and students apply for paid coaching positions; Stratton herself coached a men’s basketball team. BYU–Idaho even provides uniforms. It’s a main reason Stratton, as a multisport high school athlete, chose BYU–Idaho, she says.
Stratton became the student area director of all sports programs at the university, working directly under Shippen, with responsibilities spanning budgeting, hiring, train-ing, and more. “It was like being given an actual business to run,” says Stratton, calling the training invaluable. Shippen guided her and let her propose solutions, she says.
Stratton was involved in building a flashy website for the program—an exercise that cemented what she was learning in her coursework. She even assisted with adding a sport—battleship (think of “sinking” students in kayaks in the school pool), which is still played to this day.
“Our program is definitely student led,” says Shippen. “That’s one of the beauties of BYU–Idaho. It’s student led not only in sports but all over campus. . . . We try to give students the opportunity to be in front.”
The university continually brings Stratton back; once she was a keynote speaker at BYU–Idaho’s campuswide Power to Become (P2B) conference, where she encouraged students to realize their potential. “She’s always trying to make things better,” says Shippen, “and those kinds of people are just contagious.”
Today Stratton works remotely in Draper, Utah, where she lives with her husband and three daughters. She’s as motivated as ever in her day job managing multimillion-dollar projects. She has returned to Madagascar, where she served her mission, for humanitarian trips. And she continues to serve her alma mater.
“You feel it when you come on this campus,” says Stratton. “Graduates of BYU–Idaho have great potential. We’re given the tools here to learn and grow and improve. If we go out intending to make a difference, we will drastically change the workforce.”
