Student reads his way to academic perfection
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PROVO, Utah — When Ari Bruening was in the second grade, he read The Hobbit. By third grade, he read The Lord of the Rings.
His reading was, to say the least, beyond the standard primers.
"When I had friends in kindergarten, they'd watch TV all the time," he recalled. "That was weird to me. To me, when you had nothing to do, you read."
Today, the 22-year-old BYU student still has his nose in books. Soon, he hopes they will be law books at Harvard, Yale, Stanford or Columbia Law School. And being one of only 13 of 23,908 to receive a perfect score on the 2001 Law School Admission Test, he stands a good chance of entering one of the Ivy League schools a year from now. The aspiring lawyer holds a 4.0 GPA and also earned a perfect score on the ACT exam in 1996.
Those make for pretty good odds. He hopes to go into environmental law or legal ethics.
He doesn't remember when he wasn't reading on his own. "That's what my parents encouraged. I'm sure [my mother] read to me," he said during a telephone interview.
"He's always reading," said his wife, the former Diana Van Orden, who was his co-valedictorian in high school in West Valley City, Utah. "In the morning, I'll read the cereal box, and he'll read a deep philosophy book," she added, laughing.
Not that a young Ari Bruening never took his nose out of a book while growing up in the home of Darold and Sandra Bruening, who still live in West Valley City. He ran track and cross country and loved watching the football team. He doesn't recall being teased by other students about his grades or study habits. When someone is successful academically early in life, he said, "his attitude will determine what others feel. If he's prideful, they'll treat him in a bad way."
For all his love of learning, he is still like any other young husband. He's out of class daily by mid-afternoon and strives to finish any homework and reading by early evening.
He is a research assistant in BYU's Department of Philosophy and speaks fluent Tagalog, having served in the Philippines Manila Mission from 1997-1999. The Bruenings, who married in the Mount Timpanogos Utah Temple in 2000, are members of the BYU 139th Ward, BYU 18th Stake. He is the stake Sunday School president; she serves as the ward Relief Society compassionate service leader.
