Week 90: which college should I join?

I spent most of this preparation day deciding on what college I should go to and reflecting on what I should do in this life. It was an important thing, but as a result I was unable to email in my normal time period. I got once-only permission from Sister Hillier to email after we turned in at night, but this is going to be a shorter email than normal because of it.

Here is the big thing I came up with regarding colleges:

In deciding, I do not know enough about what the college experience will be like, nor do I know the specifics of what it will be like at either BYU or Carnegie Mellon. I don’t know if CMU is going to feel like “I’m trying to get away with going to a non-religious environment and still maintain my spiritual health” or “It’s not a risk to go to CMU in terms of spiritual danger, as my spiritual health will fall to the most part to what I make it to be – it’s up to me.” I also don’t know if BYU is going to feel like “I can’t get any of the career opportunities I wanted! I needed the competitive edge of CMU!” or “the connections I made and the academics I have are easily enough at BYU as I don’t need to be the best at my career to get to the opportunities I want.”

I think that either school’s career paths depend a lot more on my personal performance, for the level I’m concerned with. But I think I’ve figured out how I can preserve both options until I have more experience. I feel like I start off my college education at Carnegie Mellon. Should I change my mind, or feel I need to switch to a more spiritually supportive environment after a year of schooling, I can transfer to BYU. (I almost certainly would not be able to transfer from BYU to CMU, however.) Because I don’t know what either school is like, and that the best knowledge will be the experience of actually going to the college, going to CMU first will best preserve my options for school.

This does not mean I have decided on going to CMU, however. First, as of writing this I still have not prayed for confirmation of a decision, since this is the closest I’ve come to actually making a decision. Beyond that, or as well as that, I believe the next week’s General Conference may provide some further insight.

Second, if this does prove to be the right course of action, I am only set out for one year at CMU before deciding to continue at CMU or transfer to BYU. The “final” decision would be delayed until I actually have experience in what college is like.

I feel a lot better now that I’ve been able to spell out my reasoning. I increasingly felt like the best option may be what I just described, but I have not been able to support it in reasoning. Until now, I felt like if I were to pray about it, I would receive the answer that I hadn’t sufficiently thought about it enough. Once I realized the main point that going to college would be to get best experience I could, and also knowing that I could either get further confirmation by attending CMU or change my mind and transfer to BYU after a year, I knew I could live with that decision.

Of course, I still need to confirm it with prayer. General conference’s timing is fortunate for my decision, as I will wait to include that in my decision-making process as well.

As for what else I realized about college and life during this recent period of contemplation. I read the talk “Focus and Priorities” from the April 2001 General Conference by Elder Oaks (https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2001/04/focus-and-priorities). I recommend reading it. From that talk, it is clear that I must not only seek first for the Kingdom of God before riches, but entirely forsake the vain things of the world altogether. Through studying that talk, I understood that I had the idea of worldly success – go to a good college, make as much money as possible, and thus find happiness – intertwined with how college would best help me build God’s Kingdom. I should not and will not seek for property, prominence, pride, or power. The best way I found to go about that is remembering that money has power to it. The love of power, more basically, is not trusting in God; loving the power of oneself more than the power of God is the fundamental evil in money. As money is power [or can be converted into things, effort, time, or skills], it can also be used for good. Keeping a spiritual perspective will resolve most any concerns or worries about money better than a direct effort or approach to use it well.

Because of these ideas and commitments, I intend to approach my studies with somewhat of a different angle from the rest of my peers. I know I can go to CMU and be in good standing with the church; I do not have to go to BYU for spiritual health. It’s just that I may want to.

One of the harder things about going to CMU will be that the nearest temple – Columbus, Ohio – is three hours away. That means about eight hours in all for a temple trip, unless I decide to minor in small craft aviation and buy a small plane. I would only be able to go to the temple once a month or so, a sharp contrast to BYU’s casual five to ten minute drive to either of two temples.

In Pittsburgh, I will also be farther from family. I can FaceTime as often as possible, which will supplement things, but Sunday family dinners just aren’t the same by FaceTime. I could still videoconference in if we wanted to have regular family time, but it would be far from the same.

My career seems to require developing knowledge of things, which suggests (from some personal things) that it fits into my primary interests of math or computers, not wholly in my secondary interests in the arts, music, business, or cooking.

**********

Some other things that happened this week:

I overused my knee last week, so this week I was told to rest it. We kept to the apartment for most of the afternoons so it could heal. No use in having a crippled knee longer than necessary; pushing it will just make recovery take longer. Besides, my bike is in the shop for this week (as Tyson might not have been sober when he last worked on it). It would be slow walking.

We got to go to the Jordan River temple open house with Vanessa and Jeremy, one of the newest families we are working with. They have had us over a few times, which has been great; most everyone else is very hard to get ahold of right now.

My taking responsibility for my actions helped when a slow morning rolled around. I took a long shower under the silent pretense of my knee, but really I was tired. Some of it was probably from the medicine the mission nurse asked me to take, but I would have been fine. I went to take a nap afterward, but chose instead to tell Elder Vandehei that I was not acting with diligence and felt that I had wasted valuable mission time. From there, the day went off well. Taking responsibility helped to minimize the damage caused by my bad choice.

We attended a road show for special needs kids. A rainbow of friends.

Elder Vandehei and I are pretty good friends, despite not being similar.

We need a fellowshipping family for Dawnette, and her kids, Hunter, and Dagan. The lack of a solid fellowshipper caused us to not to want to leave them alone at church, even thought we wanted to go to another ward with another investigator family. Because of that, the second family didn’t go to their home ward (but they did attend church – just a different ward). We actually were able to make it over to the second family’s ward, but we did not get to see them. It was a little frustrating, as we don’t think the other ward will have that family in mind for next week, either. But we have to understand, as the ward is unusually small.

We helped Dawnette realize she has to lead by example. We did that through her sons cursing (where did they learn that? Is there anyone around them who can be a good influence for them so they don’t do that? You [Dawnette] are a major influence in their lives.)

I happened to run into a man who works for Microsoft. He told me – unprovoked – that he would write a good report for me; if I wanted an internship and perhaps a job at Microsoft, he could almost assure me one in any field of choice. He also suggested I try project management. I have no idea what that entails.

MTC activity on Saturday – a really dedicated ward made a wonderful missionary training activity for their youth. Two non-members showed up, which would be an interesting experience for them. The youth were very solid in how they supported their friends.

The Messiah concert was on Sunday night. We didn’t know if Mike was there (he’s the music theory teacher we want to set a return appointment with). Today that he has pneumonia, so singing the oratorio is probably not a good idea.