The link between on-campus leadership and the opportunities that involvement can create is especially immediate for 2015 graduate Ben Goltz.

Goltz, who briefly attended BSU in 2008 but dropped out, will take his computer science degree directly into a web-developer position with Digi-Key Electronics in Thief River Falls. He eventually hopes to benefit from the company’s financial support for post-graduate study.

His experiences at BSU made him a much more confident job candidate. Those include serving as vice president of the student Computer Science Club, working as a teaching associate in a computer science lab, and being invited to present his own research in artificial neural networks last August at a scholarly conference at the University of California, Berkeley.

He largely credits Dr. Marty Wolf, a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, who – among other things – seized on his idea to use a small, affordable computer called a Raspberry Pi to teach assembly-language programming.

Goltz said Wolf has mentored him on how to share his growing expertise with peers.

“He’s helped me identify the ‘when’ and the ‘how,’” Goltz said. “He’s really forced me to think about making sure that when I do speak up, I can do it in a way that’s really understood.”