George goes to Iowa in search of college (1888) and is accepted at Simpson College (1890). Getting an opportunity to study agriculture and realizing that to help his people he needs to switch to that, he sadly leaves his art classes behind.

Chapter 4 - A Human Being

 
With his destination no more specific than the spacious state of Iowa, Carver said he “drifted” there, maybe mostly taking trains the 350 miles north through Kansas City. Forty miles short of Des Moines he found work on a family farm eight miles south of Winterset. In free time he cut through a neighbor’s pasture down to the woods and walked along a little creek to revel in the lushest plant life he had ever seen, growing from what he later described as “forty feet of alluvial deposit in some places, impossible to wear… out, even with some of our lack of methods.” The soil was granite ground to powder 15,000 years ago by the moving burden of mile-thick glaciers, leaving terrain level as a golf course. European newcomers, discovering this agricultural treasure—a landscape made of plant food—had sectioned it into fields, dotted it with white farmhouses, red barns and windmills, and grown crops for food and fodder.
Eldon Baker, a young man of twenty in the family whose pasture George cut through, recalled him emerging from the timber with hands and pockets full of plants, rocks and flowers, “and what wonderful things he could tell us,” Baker said, “about the simple plants, bugs or rocks he had found in our pasture… that had always been there, but to which we had never paid any attention… We didn’t know we were listening to one of the greatest minds in America, but we knew he had us intensely interested.
“Some of the boys,” he continued, “looked… out of the corners of their eyes… because I associated… with this Negro… I had no idea what the name… George Washington Carver would come to mean, but I knew that here was a fellow different from anyone else I knew and, white or black, I liked him.”

 
Years later, when Carver was illustrating bulletins he wrote for his people’s farmers and a reporter asked the same question—“What really is the motive behind this continuous, never-tiring work?”—he gave the bigger answer: “Well, some day I will have to leave this world… When that day comes, I want to feel that I have an excuse for having lived in it. I want to feel that my life has been of some service to my fellow man.”

He joined a fraternity at Tuskegee because its motto was, “Culture for service, and service for humanity.” “Happiness,” he told an audience of Tuskegee students, “is the crystallization of services rendered for the betterment of mankind. There are riches far above silver and gold… that no amount of money can buy, and that is the supreme joy of loving humanity. However hard the task one performs, the servant gets much joy and satisfaction out of it, because it is such loving service.”
One of his favorite speech-closing poems put service above clothing styles “chosen with taste and fastidious care,” “the size of your pile in the bank,” “the number of acres you own,” physical strength, or “the servants that come at your call.” I ended,

It isn’t the things you possess;
It’s service that measures success.

He envisioned a world where, in order to gain a position of authority, one would need a proven attitude of service, of “infinite patience and consideration,… given without stint to each individual… Those only,” he said, “with such dispositions and spirit of service should be sought for. Any supervisor who does not have the correct attitude… should be removed to some other duty.”