Cornell President Emeritus Hunter Rawlings wants students to know that he could never have predicted nor planned the full trajectory of his career, and that there is "no need to panic" if they have not figured out their life's work while still in college.

One key to his "rather serendipitous career" was his resolve not to look beyond whatever position he held at the time, said Rawlings, a professor of classics at Cornell, April 19 at "Bethe Ansatz" in the Bethe House dean's apartment, where the couches were filled with a mix of undergraduate and graduate students, and faculty.

"At each stage, I thought that was it," he said. "Without that I don't think I could do my job. I always feel like I need to be completely committed."

Rawlings' first plan was to be a Major League pitcher. But during his senior year of high school, after he got an offer from the Baltimore Orioles to play on their development team, his mother insisted, "'Come fall, you are going to college,'" Rawlings recalled her saying.

At Haverford College, Rawlings said he fell in love with ancient Greek and Latin and decided to become a college professor. After completing a Ph.D. at Princeton, he accepted a position as associate professor of classics at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

"I found that life just fantastic: the freedom of ... teaching, writing. I thought for the rest of my life I want to do nothing else but this," he said. "But sometimes, one thing leads serendipitously to another."

Serving on various faculty committees, Rawlings said he thoroughly enjoyed meeting professors from diverse academic disciplines and was exposed to the full diversity of scholarship and institutional complexity of large research universities.

When a position for assistant provost opened up, he seized it. "I found that contrary to a lot of what my colleagues said, I didn't hate it," he confessed. "So I got into administration in a serious way."

These extracurricular faculty positions, he said, prepared him for a career path he had never planned on taking: president of a top-tier research university -- first at the University of Iowa and then at Cornell.

Rawlings pointed to his willingness to explore new territory and his constant desire to learn as the source of his skills for high-level administration. "I never took a course in management or business of any kind or higher education theory," he admitted.

"We've got to get students over the idea that if they don't major in something 'practical,' they won't get a job," said Rawlings, although he expressed sympathy for the pressures students are under to get a job that will "pay" in the current job market.

Rawlings will enter the next stage of his "serendipitous" career at the end of this academic year, when he will go to Washington, D.C., to serve as president of the Association of American Universities. Fortunately, shared Rawlings, while at UC-Boulder, he had accepted a position on the State Commission on Higher Education, for which he learned to convey the interests and values of large research universities to politicians and businessmen -- once again, a skill he acquired without any plan to make a job out of it.

"Bethe Ansatz" takes place at Bethe House Professor and Dean Scott MacDonald's apartment every Wednesday from 7:15-8:15 p.m.

Paul Bennetch '12 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.