News - Alumni

Alumnus Interview: Mikle South

02.10.10

Recently we caught up with Mikle South, Class of 1988, who was on campus to speak at February’s Parents’ Association Meeting about Waterford’s scholarship program. A scholarship student himself, Mikle did his undergraduate work at Yale, earned his Ph.D at the University of Utah, and returned to Yale for a Post-Doctoral Fellowship. Mikle and his family (his wife, Kristen, taught English and History at Waterford for several years) have come back and settled in Utah, and we are happy to have them so near. Following are excerpts from our conversation with Mikle.

So what are you doing these days, work-wise?

I teach at BYU; I’m an assistant professor in Psychology and Neuroscience. I do research in the neurobiology of the autism spectrum, and I especially study the overlap of anxiety and autism— something that’s important because we really don’t have a definition for autism.

Don’t you specialize in adolescent autism?

Yes. It’s an easy population to get, and it’s really interesting to see how depression and anxiety interplay with autism at that point in the kids’ lives. We get the kids right at the point where there is an increased awareness of themselves— a sort of “Wait a minute, I’m different, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

So we know what you love to do now. What did you love to do when you were at Waterford?

Play soccer! I did it with Coach Capener. We won two state championships. I played left back.

Alumnus Interview: Matt Wells

11.01.09

Matt Wells

Matt Wells graduated from Waterford in 1988. He and his wife, Anita, have four children, two of whom started at Waterford this fall. The family has a Russian Dwarf hamster named Topsy and a cat named Aspen. When they moved back to Utah from California, they built their house in Sandy, in part to be close to our campus.

You graduated in 1988, when Waterford was still on its Provo campus. What do you remember about that campus compared to the one we have built in Sandy?

I was in the original Class VII with Jason Miller, Mike Johnson and company. At one point, my parents had all six of their children attending and my father, who was on the psychology faculty at BYU, served as a school counselor. This was before tuition, and classes were limited to 25 students per grade so it was a small, close-knit group. Each year prior to school commencing, we gathered for a “Waterford Work Day” and helped clean and spruce up the grounds around the single, old school building with two classroom wings that had been a Catholic school (our French class met in the chapel and we threw pots in the cafeteria kitchen area behind the gym, which never actually functioned as a kitchen so we all brought sack lunches) and the interim site of BYU’s law school when it was founded in 1973.

News - Alumni

Alumnus Interview: Mikle South

So what are you doing these days, work-wise?

Don’t you specialize in adolescent autism?

So we know what you love to do now. What did you love to do when you were at Waterford?

Alumnus Interview: Matt Wells

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