BYU's blue-chip recruits not limited to athletics

PROVO — Sam Dittmer's last name may sound a lot like Ty Detmer's, but it's no more similar than the tales of how Dittmer and Detmer wound up at Brigham Young University, where Dittmer began fall classes Tuesday with 4,684 other freshmen.

BYU recruited Detmer hard, coveting the Texas high school football phenom who eventually chose to play quarterback in Provo, broke numerous passing records and won a Heisman Trophy.

BYU recruited Dittmer just as hard. An Indiana high school phenom, Dittmer had excelled on a national stage. The best schools threw big money at him; Stanford offered $25,000 in annual financial aid.

Like a blue-chip football recruit, Dittmer even made a paid recruiting visit to BYU's campus in January as he was completing his senior year in high school.

The difference? Dittmer is a coveted math superstar far better prepared to crunch Detmer's numbers than to surpass them on the field.

But again like Detmer, he chose BYU for the chance to "play" early in his college career, albeit at a high level in the classroom instead of in a stadium.

"The big thing is students can work along with professors here," said Dittmer, who also got an acceptance letter from MIT. "Other schools put a lot into their graduate schools, and graduate students teach a lot of undergraduate classes instead of actual professors. At BYU, professors allow undergraduates to team up with them on research, and BYU is very competitive at sending its graduates to the best graduate schools."

In 2006, the National Opinion Research Center found that BYU graduates went on to earn more doctorates between 1995 and 2004 than graduates of Stanford, MIT and Yale, and only nine schools were better.

BYU has emphasized "mentored research" for much of this decade. Last year, the university awarded more than $500,000 in research grants to 302 undergraduates. Nearly 100 faculty members received more than $1.6 million for research projects involving undergraduates.

Dittmer also is expected to start as a freshman on BYU's math competition team. As a sophomore in high school, Dittmer reached the finals of the national math Olympiad as a member of Indiana's team. A few dozen contestants answered the first seven questions correctly.

Only Dittmer could answer the eighth.

He was so accomplished that Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels adapted the state's tradition of giving the title Mr. Basketball to the state's best high school player and last year crowned Dittmer Indiana's Mr. Math.

Math department chair Tyler Jarvis channeled BYU football coach Bronco Mendenhall when he talked about this year's math recruiting class.