It’s been a luminous year on BYU’s campus as students, alumni, and staff have celebrated the university’s 150th birthday with an emphasis on seeking—and sharing—gifts of light.
The last issue of McKay School Magazine highlighted three McKay School students, from three different majors, who, in various ways, embody not only the light the university shares with the world but also the light of the Master Teacher, Jesus Christ.
In this issue, we meet our final two “beacons of light”—students who seek to serve and lead, to learn and grow—humbly and with gratitude for the journey, however hard it may be. Their light, like that of the university they represent, shines into the eternities.
Nurtured by the Love of Teachers
For Kaitlyn Roper, ’27, becoming a teacher is all about reflecting the light she has been shown.
“I had a little bit of a hard time in school, and so I had a lot of teachers who would spend a lot of time with me one on one,” said Roper, an elementary education major from Allen, Texas. Along with instruction, her teachers provided other help and mentoring. “That’s what really encouraged me to become a teacher: all that time they spent with me. I want to give back.”
As a McKay School student, she’s been able to do just that, finding her own opportunities to teach, help, and mentor.
“I love the classes, and I love that we have so many opportunities to go into schools and be hands-on,” she said. “I try to be really empathetic and understand what it’s like to be in each student’s situation, because sometimes you’re very quick to judge or to assume, but if we really put ourselves in their shoes, it goes a long way.”
The more Roper has learned about education, the more she sees how broadly it applies to life.
“Education is a big part of our lives, whether we’re teaching or not,” she said. “I hope to use it not only in the classroom but
also as a mother. Education is never going to stop being needed.”
For Roper, education is an opportunity to emulate the Master Teacher. “Using empathy and using understanding, but also trying to be like He would be, is really going to make a big difference,” she said. “I hope every child can feel the love that Christ has for them—that they’re loved and that they’re important and that they’re understood; that they feel seen and appreciated.”
Shining Through Struggle
In 2025, Adriano Carneiro, ’27, was in a deeply difficult place, both physically and emotionally. He was in the hospital, diagnosed—for the second time—with cancer. He grappled with daily pain and panic attacks as well as anxiety and depression. “I have never been so weak in my whole entire life,” he recalled.
One day, he met a woman who worked in the hospital, and they began talking. They’d had “very similar life experiences and struggles,” said Carneiro, a graduate student in the McKay School’s instructional psychology and technology (IP&T) program.
“At the end of the conversation, she shared how she was hopeless about life and, in that moment, grieving the pain of losing her only son,” he said. “She shared how she doesn’t feel like she has hope in her life and [said] the only thing she wants is to die. I had the opportunity to share my testimony with her. . . . I felt deeply for her, and she helped me understand God is in the business of saving His children on this earth.”
In that moment, Carneiro saw God’s hand in his hospital stay. “God brought me there because He is in the business of saving us. That lady became a beacon of light for me, and somehow, I also became a beacon of light for her.”
These deep insights, gained at life’s extremities, were far from Carneiro’s mind in summer 2024. He was a young father of five children, working on a master’s degree in the IP&T program and starting a nonprofit, the gamified online mentoring program Mentorius. A fan of taking big, potentially life-altering swings, Carneiro found that same ethos in BYU’s IP&T program: “Everybody in this program is trying to do something big to help the world become a better place.”
Things changed on a day that summer as he stepped out of the Provo City Center Temple after attending a session. A notification on his phone confirmed his fears—he had stage 4 cancer. What’s more, Carneiro had a large, difficult-to-treat tumor.
“I was asking myself how I can share this information with my family without breaking their faith,” Carneiro said. “I had a clear spiritual prompting: text your ministering brother and get inside the temple.”
With that prompting, Carneiro turned around and went right back inside the temple, where he met a sealer who counseled him on how to move forward with his educational plans despite the diagnosis. That sealer, Carneiros’s ministering brother, and the brother’s 15-year-old son would become beacons of light to the Carneiro family.
“It was not a surprise for God. He orchestrated this whole thing to help me keep going with those plans,” Carneiro said. “The doctors were saying there was little chance of survival; my blessings were saying something different.”
Carneiro underwent grueling chemotherapy, followed by a 10-hour surgery that doctors warned had only a 10 percent chance of success. He survived and was considered cancer-free. While still recovering from surgery, Carneiro went for a walk.
“I was talking to God,” he said. “I’d experienced a huge increase in my relationship with Him. I told Him, ‘I don’t know Your plans for me in the future, but I want to make sure this close relationship continues.’”
Shortly thereafter, a CT scan showed cancer in Carneiro’s lungs. He started the treatment process all over again. And once again, he found divinely placed opportunities to grow spiritually.
“That exact week was when our dean, Sarah Clark, gave a devotional,” Carneiro said. At the conclusion of her talk, Clark shared the four words she tells students at the end of each course she teaches: “I’m not going anywhere!” Clark applied those words to her spiritual life: “I’m telling my Heavenly Father and my Savior, Jesus Christ, ‘I’m not going anywhere!’ I’m committed to them forever. No matter what happens in my life, in the Church, or in society, I’m not going anywhere! I’m not going anywhere! I’m not going anywhere!”
Clark’s words had a powerful impact on Carneiro.
“I realized God would keep me close to Him, but there would be a big price,” he said. “That was a very powerful invitation for me, because I was planning to have a cancer-free life, and that was not God’s plan for me. But I’m not going anywhere. That’s my commitment to the Lord. It’s not an easy decision, but it’s the best decision I've ever made.”
Carneiro shared his hopes and dreams: To live. To continue to parent his children and love his wife. To grow Mentorius into the world’s largest social-impact mentoring program, helping single mothers and low-income young adults improve their education, receive mentoring, and make connections to lift themselves out of poverty.
But as he works toward those dreams, he also shared his primary plan, the task he now sees as his main purpose in life: to continue to learn from Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ and to point others to Them.
“You can become a beacon of light to someone who is struggling, and you can do this while you are also struggling,” he said. “Even when you don’t think you have the light to become a beacon of light to someone else, you do.”
Note
1. Sarah Clark, “Jesus Christ, the Master Teacher,” BYU devotional address, 20 May 2025; emphasis in original.