OXFORD — Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice shared with a Miami University audience that she originally went to college to play piano.

But when she met children who could play by sight what took her a year to learn, she quickly decided she needed a new direction. After a few missteps, Rice found her passion in Soviet studies.

“Finding your passion is the most important thing you can do while you’re at college,” Rice told the audience of the Anderson Lecture Series.

She offered other advice for students: Try something hard, which she said will be more rewarding than succeeding at something easy. Study abroad and learn another language, which will teach people more about themselves. And finally, remain optimistic.

Rice spoke of the “transforming power of education.” But, she said, she worries that America’s greatest security threat is the state of its kindergarten to 12th-grade education systems. And that she can tell whether a person will get a good education by looking at his or her ZIP code.

She also said America must continue to work to heal failed and failing nations, which represent a threat. It was, she told the audience, a group of students in a failed nation who launched the attack on Sept. 11, 2001, that killed 3,000 people.

“This is a tough battle ... It is one from which we cannot turn away.

“We learned we can’t just defend. We have to push the frontier forward to take them on on their own territory,” she said. “The United States has no choice but to stand for the values that we ourselves enjoy.”

In a final question and answer portion of her address, Rice was asked what she would do next: Run for President? Silencing the applause on the idea, she said no, she did not even run for student body president in college.

“I am actually a university person,” she said, adding she loves the moment in the eyes of a student when they realize something new. “I expect to be a university professor for a long time.”