By Brittany Rogers

Above image by BYU Photo

With a launchpad like BYU, there's no ceiling for a student like Ethan Hardy.

One could easily miss the chapel at Harvard’s largest teaching hospital, Massachusetts General, what with the hospital beds and stretchers lining the corridor and medical staff streaming past.

“It’s a bustling hospital,” says BYU biochemistry student Ethan Hardy, who passed the chapel every day of his summer premed research internship.

Then one day he wandered in.

Light filtered through a stained-glass rose window on the chapel’s main wall. Through the dim, empty room, he saw it—a piano in the far corner. He gravitated to the instrument and lifted the cover: a Steinway.

His heart leapt. “I was like, ‘Whoa, this is legit,’ ” Hardy says.

He was there for a prestigious internship with thoracic surgeon Chi-Fu Jeffrey Yang—an unbelievable opportunity for an undergrad, a sophomore no less, made possible thanks to the networking of BYU alumni. But for Hardy, a former piano performance major feeling alone in a new city, the chapel became a kind of home.

Photo by Bradley Slade

Hardy joined the weekly Song Chapel service, accompanying a singing group led by chaplains. When a security staff member at the hospital passed away, Hardy played for the memorial. “I frequently found myself hitting [the piano] before work,” he says, adding, “I would spend time playing on my own for anybody at the hospital who wanted to sit and listen.”

“Ethan was so service oriented,” says Reverend Donna Blagdan, director of the chapel and of the hospital’s Spiritual Care Department. And so spiritual. “You rarely find people who are expressive of their spirituality, who identify as deeply spiritual,” she adds. “Ethan was very refreshing in that regard.”

Reflecting now on that summer—“easily one of the most formative and enjoyable of my life,” says Hardy—he is in awe of the many doors BYU has opened to him. There are no bounds at BYU, he says, from the service students take part in to the scholarships available, from the religious underpinnings in every classroom to the labs in which students can join faculty in top-tier research.

“There’s a feeling here, like you’re empowered to do anything you want with your life,” says Hardy. “You really feel unstoppable.”

Learning to Sit the Bench

At BYU Hardy’s biggest challenge has been choosing between his loves—music, math, medicine, and research.

Like many kids, Hardy grew up resisting piano lessons. Unlike many kids, he did math problems for fun, completing lessons on the free Khan Academy platform in his downtime. “I remember coming home from school and churning through problems,” he says.

He credits YouTube with drawing him back to the piano. Through online tutorials, Hardy learned to play his favorite pop songs. He picked up formal lessons again in middle school, after the family moved from Reno, Nevada, to Heber, Utah.

His party-trick song, whipped out at talent shows and Especially for Youth camps: “Bumble Boogie.” The fast-paced ditty is “like ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ with a boogie-woogie baseline,” Hardy says. Fingers fly up and down the keys.

In high school he took a classical turn, mastering 11-minute numbers like Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2 in B-flat Minor, Op. 31. Hardy had extra time to practice after busting his tibia and fibula in a skiing accident. But the tale of how the doctor pounded “a titanium rod into my leg,” says Hardy, sparked another interest: medicine.

Hardy began shadowing a physician in his ward and teaching piano lessons on the side. He hoped to follow both threads one day at BYU. “Both of my parents went there, and they both talked about it like it was the best years of their lives,” he says; his dad was the guy shaving the Y into his chest hair at football games.

Once Hardy was accepted, his next goal was auditioning for the Y ’s highly selective piano performance program.

“I show up and hear the person before me,” says Hardy. The talent floored him. “It scared me to death.” Only 14 freshmen are admitted to the program each year. Hardy was not one of them.

With his mission call to the Philippines in hand, Hardy shrugged it off. “I figured I would study chemistry,” he says. But then COVID-19 diverted Elder Hardy to Montana, where he had far more access to a piano again. There, Hardy and other musical elders, including a member of BYU Young Ambassadors, lived for preparation days, when they could create moving arrangements of hymns to share online.

As his mission drew to a close, he decided to take another stab at the BYU audition. He felt more ready than ever.

“I had grown in maturity and in discipline,” says Hardy. “I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it.”

This time: success.

Background Music

Still, Hardy was torn. The music major was also a premed student, after all (while medical schools require specific courses, they accept students from a wide range of majors).

“I have this conversation burned into my mind,” he says, recalling a piano professor’s question at the end of an individual lesson. “I think he sensed something in me,” says Hardy. “It was a great lesson; he gave me incredible feedback. But then he did what a good teacher should do. He asked, ‘Do you really want to do this?’”

After all it took to gain admittance—and with his piano faculty’s full support—Hardy pivoted. STEM was calling.

Incredibly, Hardy had the aptitude to excel in three different disciplines. In fact, he won simultaneous scholarships from the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department and the Mathematics Department.

“Ethan received our top biochemistry student award last semester,” says biochemistry professor Barry Willardson. “He is among the most talented students—perhaps the best—I have seen at BYU over my 28 years here. He has a beautiful mind and great work ethic mixed with humility, a rare combination.”

Hardy settled on a biochemistry major and a math minor—but he did not abandon piano completely. He continues to play in his student wards, and he had a stint playing live music in university dance classes. “It was a really fun way to keep myself involved in music,” says Hardy, who loved the improvising. Best of all, he found a 9-year-old to tutor.

Their friendship began during Hardy’s first semester at BYU, when Hardy volunteered as a music teacher at Provo’s South Franklin Community Center. The expectation was to offer free lessons to qualifying families for one or two semesters. Hardy and Elian Cardona continued lessons for two years.

Photo by BYU Photo

“They are great friends,” says Ilca Bonilla, Elian’s mother, via a translator. (The family, hailing from Guatemala, speaks Spanish.) “Ethan is the grand maestro,” she continues. “My son, Elian, is very timid. He loves the piano, but he was always afraid to play in front of other people.” Through Hardy’s mentorship, Elian gained confidence. “Now he plays all the time,” says Bonilla, “including in sacrament meeting.”

“Those two years were among the most meaningful experiences I’ve had with music,” says Hardy, who put in extra hours to help prepare Elian to showcase his skills at the United Way of Utah County’s 60th anniversary celebration.

The pair had to part ways when Hardy left town for Boston for the BYU premed internship, where he would find another way for piano to be his background music.

Fine-Tuning His Path

The BYU Premedical Research Internship Program places BYU undergraduates in top medical-research labs across the country, gilding their future med-school applications. When Hardy heard he got the internship, he flew from the library to exult. “I was freaking out,” he says.

Placed at Harvard with Dr. Yang, a principal investigator with a history of National Institutes of Health funding, Hardy was tasked with writing grant proposals and planning a medical conference. The experience informed his future.

After having a front-row seat to Dr. Yang ’s clinical research, Hardy wanted to experience bench science—the kind conducted in a laboratory. Now, back at BYU, he’s studying blood vessel formation in the lab of chemistry professor Kenneth Christensen, who sees his students as collaborators.

“We give our students the opportunity to function as grad students would at other institutions,” says Christensen. “We put them in an environment where they’re involved in developing questions that are relevant, in working toward science that helps humanity, and that is a big catalyst for students like Ethan.”

Hardy’s goals continue to focus: instead of med school, his sights are now set on grad schools known for research in protein engineering and structural biology, such as Stanford or MIT. “I hope to end up at a place that uses and develops new technology to study living systems,” he says. After all the changes, he believes he’s finally found his niche. “My favorite spot on campus is getting into my zone in my research lab,” he says. “You have your experiment all planned out and you’re just flowing. I think that’s my favorite place to be.”

He’s finishing his undergraduate degree in three and a half years, astounded at all he’s packed in. “BYU has lived up to the hype,” he says, nodding to his parents’ affinity for their alma mater. “It’s surpassed my expectations,” he adds, crediting his professors, “people who care about who I am, who believe in me, who think I have valuable contributions to make.”

“The research he’s done at BYU is high caliber,” says Christensen, who expects Hardy will have the opportunity to work at the cutting edge of his field in some of the nation’s top graduate programs. “There are opportunities for people coming from BYU to go to those high-tier places, and they flourish.

“Ethan has a bright future,” Christensen continues. “He’s likely to make a big impact.”