When Jenifer Greenwood began her Master’s program in 1993, she had a certain path in mind. Get a Master’s in literature, get her doctorate, and go on to teach literature at a university level. By 1994, she’d actually had some experience teaching writing as a college class. By the end of her time at Brigham Young University, though, she needed to do an internship to complete her degree. Given her place of study, an internship for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was a convenient place to go.
She did the internship for a few months, then she went home for Christmas.
“I was up in Washington, literally, no one knew I was there,” Greenwood said. “And I had been there about 24 hours, and I got a phone call from church magazine saying, ‘Hey, would you like to come work for us?’ That was an amazing piece of my story that that was also not my plan. That turned into eventually a full-time job and 16 years of working at church magazines.”
In her time working for the Church, she’s worked as editor for the Liahona, helped develop content and manage initiatives for web pages and conference publishing, and more recently, worked on the general handbook as well. Through it all, there have been some wonderful opportunities to learn.
“The General Handbook. It doesn’t sound interesting, but I have to always say that it is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever been a part of in my 27 years of Church employment and that is because we’ve been able to watch revelation distill sometimes.”
Her opportunity to work on general policies, though, didn’t come until she followed a singular prompting.
“I was well established in my career and actually serving as the stake primary president. And I'd been serving for about five years. And I just one day had this really gentle nudge: fix it. Which was fix this thing that I had regretted for all of these years.”
While she’d found great promise in taking the position working on the Liahona, she’d always felt pangs of guilt in not having finished her Master’s degree. As she took on the challenge of a Master’s in Public Administration, though, she eventually found new opportunities. From her education, she moved on from audience manager to director of policy.
“I had thought I was getting the degree for personal reasons. I called it my repentance degree. I was going back I was fixing something and I was healing something. But I got promoted. I have had amazing opportunities. I probably would have had them without a master's degree. But I think it sent a message of my just being serious about career advancement, about lifelong learning about following God's plan for my life, even when it didn't necessarily align with my individual plan.”
Through being diligent in her work, she found a way to new opportunities.