Margaret L. Williams had a lot on her mind for a 10-year-old.
As she walked the half-block home from her best friend's house, she couldn't help but think about her future.
“I don't know what got me thinking about it,” she admitted, “but I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I'm going to spend a long time at work, so I better find something I like to do.”
Those answers did not come quickly for the fourth grader, who had recently braved a move from Florida to Ohio. The daughter of a pastor, she spent her school days caring about others and speaking up when needed.
She didn't really consider herself a leader, but her teachers thought otherwise.
“In seventh grade, my science teacher pulled me aside because there was a group of us being disruptive in class,” Williams recalled. “He told me, ‘You're the leader in this class. Could you encourage people to pay a little more attention to what's going on in class?'”
Williams genuinely enjoyed school, but she was not drawn to a specific field of study. By the time she enrolled in college at Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio, she decided to major in environmental biology with a secondary interest in psychology.
She lived a disciplined lifestyle by joining the swim team and becoming the editor of the student newspaper. But Williams never truly had a clear career goal – a fun fact she likes to share with undergraduates in her role as dean of Texas Tech University's Jerry S. Rawls College of Business.
“I like to tell them that I was a biology major because they're worried about their next step and how that's going to determine the rest of their lives,” she said. “But that's not the case. You have a lot of different decision points along the way that will ultimately shape what you do.”