Study as if your life depended on it

I love this statement Elder Jeffrey R. Holland made in a 1983 devotional when he was president of BYU. The emphasis is mine:

The court in which you have come to play and the contest you have chosen to undertake is that of Latter-day Saint higher education. This is a university, and you are invited to immerse yourself in developing your learning, and your love for learning, here. I have said before that there are less expensive ways to hold young adult conferences. Furthermore we could help you get dates, watch ball games, and stand in various and sundry lines without building and staffing what I believe to be the finest university in the world. You come here today as BYU students have for over a hundred years, committed to the proposition that “the glory of God is intelligence” (D&C 93:36) and that “whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection” (D&C 130:18). We come to the university above all to “seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118).

Study as if your life depended on it, for surely in the most important ways it does. You will have paid too much of your own and others’ money if you do not take away from here the very best education we can provide you. Resist the temptation to idle your way through. Study first and then relax, when you can be more honorable and less troubled in doing so. Discipline. Discipulus. Pupil. Discipline your mind and your will and your habits. Set a course for yourself now that will make you successful in every private and public endeavor you pursue for the rest of your life. Get up in the morning and go to bed at night, not vice versa. Work hard. Go the extra mile along the remarkable pathway that is so generously provided you here. See the meaning now and avoid the lamentations later. I could be an independently wealthy man if I had a dollar for every freshman who wasted his first year, even in so noble a cause as waiting for a mission call. Far, far too many return to the university only to learn that like the great mark of the beast recorded in the book of Revelation, those D’s and E’s are forever inscribed on the forehead of their official academic transcript. Make every opportunity count–every class, every semester. Attend our forum and devotional series. They are some of the rarest opportunities BYU can afford, untried and unafforded at any other university in the country. As with every privilege we need to “use it or lose it.

There are treasures to find at BYU that may well never be our privilege to pursue again once we leave here. These include “great treasures of knowledge, even hidden treasures,” to quote scripture, and it is your privilege to seek them out and claim them as your own.