By Natalie Clark
Handing out surveys, spending hours in the library researching and pulling all-nighters are common occurrences for college students completing a research project.
Adam Welch, a junior majoring in geography, experienced all these while working on his research project for his geography class last fall. Welch had the luxury of choosing his topic about marriage and BYU students.
?I just wanted to research something that was really interesting to people,? Welch said. ?It was so interesting to me to see people meet and get married so quickly. Everyone is interested in marriage around here, and the statistics prove it.?
Marriage trends at BYU are the exception rather than the rule when compared to other colleges across the nation.
Fifty-one percent of students who graduated from BYU last year were married. Only 3 percent of the Yale University graduating class were married, and the national average of married graduates is 11 percent.
Most BYU students are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the LDS church has a strong focus on marriages and family.
According to ?The Family: A Proclamation to the World,? ?The family is ordained of God. Marriage between man and woman is essential to His eternal plan.?
To study BYU marriage trends, Welch handed out surveys to 100 single students and 100 married students and asked them to answer questions such as, ?How long did you know your spouse before you got married?? and ?How old were you when you got married??
Welch found that, on average, couples at BYU usually date about six months before becoming engaged, 41 percent of married students met at a church activity and the average age students are when they get married is about 22 years old.
The average age across the nation for men to get married is about 25 and for women is almost 27.
One of the questions on the survey handed out to single students asked, ?What is your interest level in marriage?? On a scale from one to five, about 35 percent answered level three.
?It was so funny because everyone in the class was really intrigued, especially the singles students because they want to find out where they should be, at what time and what should they be studying to have the best probability of meeting their future spouse,? Welch said.
Most married students met at a church activity, after 5 p.m. during the fall semester.
As for Welch, he was against the norm. He met his wife, Becca, in an orchestra class, in the morning, and they dated for a year and a half before getting married.