As it turns out, I was 2+ years into my college career at Brigham Young University and I still had no idea what major I wanted to enter or career I wanted to pursue. Thankfully, I happened upon a brown-bag address in the Wilkinson Center at BYU being delivered by my then favorite author on spiritual topics: Truman Madsen.
I missed the opening of his presentation, but I caught the most important part — at least the part that seemed absolutely perfect for my circumstances. In addressing the question of how to choose a major and pursue a career, Madsen suggested three points:
- Choose something you enjoy
- Choose something you’re good at
- Choose something you can change the world with while supporting your family
Interestingly, I do not remember anything else from his talk. But I do know that those three points resonated throughout my very being. I thought about his 
talk all the way home that afternoon, and as I did, I realized that the classes that I had enjoyed the most and had gotten the best grades in were EACH in Mass Communications. That was an incredibly eye-opening realization for me, and it led me on a short-lived but important journey to discover what majors were available in the Department of Mass Communications at BYU.
Long-story short (and for a variety of reasons, some of which I was actually mistaken about), I decided that Public Relations made the most sense for me versus pursuing a Mass Communications degree with an emphasis in Journalism, Advertising or Interpersonal Communications. And in spite of the fact that I only managed a C+ in my “Introduction to Public Relations” class — thank you very much, Dr. Bradley — the truth is that I excelled in PR and ended up with a GPA in my major of better than 3.5 on a 4.0 scale. (Not remarkable by itself, but given that I had been flirting with an overall 2.0 GPA, 3.5+ was pretty good for me.)
And for the past 27+ years, I’ve been doing PR every day of my career. And for the most part, not only has it been a blast (aka, I enjoy it), but I’m actually quite good at it too. I’ve since become quite good at many of the other areas of mass communications and marketing as well, which is nice. But I’ve also learned that done properly, PR has made it possible to support my family fairly well while helping to change the world.
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