Gregory Wurm

Provo, UT

Winner of Mary P. Oenslager Scholastic Achievement Awards (SAA) for Students who are Blind/Visually Impaired

Gregory Wurm

Greg Wurm, a sociology masters student at Brigham Young University in Provo Utah, is from Gilbert, Arizona and is the son of John T. Wurm and the late Janis Thatcher. Since 2010, Greg has had a visual impairment preventing his two eyes from working together properly. The condition has made reading almost impossible and caused severe headaches. Learning Ally and other accommodations have enabled him to change the course of his life after the onset of his visual/reading disability. Greg served a two-year volunteer mission for his church in Detroit Michigan, speaking Spanish, which sparked his interest in sociology (and is where his reading problem began). Spending most of his mission in the inner-city, and seeing the hardships faced by many, he began to ask such questions as, “How did it get this way?” and “How can I help?” Greg has focused his studies on trying to answer these questions. As an undergrad, he was part of the Social Innovation Leadership Council at BYU, attended a seminar on social entrepreneurship at Oxford University and a summer study abroad at the University of Cambridge, and did his honors thesis on Detroit. He is currently enrolled in BYU’s Master’s program in sociology focusing on theory and family studies. He plans to go on after and get a PhD in sociology from a top-10 program, possibly at the University of Michigan where he could focus his studies in Detroit. Greg is happily married to the former Kaitlyn Nelson and has one child, Peter, who enjoys eating and sleeping and was born last October.

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