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President Dallin H. Oaks recently said that he spent three of his four years as a BYU student wondering what career he should take.
In other words, the church’s future president was the same as many college students who struggle to discover what they are meant to do.
The lesson to learn from his experience was enhanced for me as I listened to him talk in this video with his successor as the university’s president, President Jeffrey R. Holland.
“I felt as I enrolled at BYU that I was going to be a doctor,” President Oaks said. “My father had been a medical doctor and I took a zoology class as a freshman, and I wasn’t more than a few weeks into that zoology class when I realized I wasn’t cut out to be a doctor. I spent the next three years trying to figure out what I was going to be.”
He majored for a while in accounting because he enjoyed it until he began to consider law school during his senior year.
“My legal training didn’t begin with an aspiration to be a lawyer or a judge,” he said in a video the church released for BYU’s 150th anniversary.
The lesson is clear: Search and pray for and ponder what your major should be, but have faith the answer will come, even if it takes years.
Then the two church leaders shared a career lesson.
President Holland asked President Oaks if he ever dreamed as a BYU student that he would become the university’s president someday.
That caused President Oaks to smile.
“No,” he said. “It never occurred to me that I would be in most of the positions I’ve been in. I’ve been drawn into things that I never dreamed I would do.”
President Holland was delighted then to share a recent experience.
“I had a young man come and talk to me the other day and say, ‘How can I do what you did? How can I follow your path up through (religious education) and be president of BYU?’
President Holland told the man it was a hopeless question.
“I didn’t plan it and I wouldn’t know how to repeat it,” he said.
Then he shared the lesson that education is more than just choosing a major or following a specific career path.
“I think the Lord does that with all of us,” President Holland said. “I’d say to our audience that he casts us about. He moves us around. There’s a learning there that you can’t always get in a course or in a textbook. I think he exposes us to a lot of different things to say, ‘This is more what you ought to do.’”
BYU’s current president told the university’s students at the forum that its leaders understand this sort of dilemma but have a deep belief in their journeys.
“Those of us that have been presidents of this institution have such a great sense of hope for what you’re going to go out and do,” Reese said as he sat next to three of his predecessors — Kevin Worthen, Elder Cecil O. Samuelson and Elder Merrill J. Bateman.
Then Reese shared a thought that squared up with what Presidents Oaks and Holland had discussed, that education is more than classroom learning. Reese could have referred to the faith Presidents Oaks and Holland exercised to keep going in the face of uncertainty as students when he asked today’s students to focus on a higher piece of the BYU.
“If there is one hope, one aspiration that I have for all of you as you enter our door,” Reese said, “it is that you can see yourself in our mission, that you can see how you’re going to fulfill that mission.”
The notion was one of three things Reese asked students to develop. The other two were gratitude and serving Jesus Christ.
That, the three presidents seemed to be saying, was the way to allow the Lord to direct one’s educational and career paths.