Faith, Family, and Culture

June 2026

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Family has always been at the core of Faith Hall’s life, even shaping her academic focus at BYU. Following a strong spiritual impression she received in a particularly inspiring Eternal Family religion class, Hall chose her major: family life with an emphasis on family studies.

“I wanted to give back, and I wanted to help communities like the one I came from,” Hall says. Hall’s mother emigrated from Ukraine and met her father while both were studying at BYU. Hall hoped someday to speak Russian with her Ukrainian relatives, so she took Russian classes at BYU. She also studied Spanish and ASL.

Although studying languages initially seemed like an academic side quest, it has led to incredible personal and academic opportunities. She used her Spanish and ASL language skills while serving as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Chile and Texas. And she followed in her parents’ footsteps by living in the Russian House in the Language Immersion Student Residence Program at BYU.

Hall earned a prestigious Boren Award and has studied abroad in Latvia, Georgia, and Ukraine, where she met her grandparents for the first time.

During a seven-month internship with the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, Hall began to see how her two main disciplines, family studies and Russian, could intertwine in meaningful ways. Her next step became clear when working as an intern to help refugees obtain documentation inspired her to pursue a law degree.

“Everything that I’ve done in life has built unforeseeable opportunities that have pushed me in a little different trajectory than I was expecting,” Hall says. “BYU has been the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

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