Dark skirt, black heels, two well-rehearsed examples ready to go. During her senior year at the University of Chicago, Sonia Vora marched through this campus-interviewing routine about a dozen times. That’s how you landed a job in financial services, she thought. You auditioned for big banks and investment firms, trials where even the opening handshake was a test of whether you’d fit in. Success depended on how closely you resembled the ideal apprentice: someone ready to embrace the long hours, rapid tempo, and endless pressure of Wall Street.
Near the end of Vora’s job hunt in the winter of 2014, though, the pattern broke.
For the first time, Vora didn’t need to deliver a canned pitch about econometrics or the merits of investing in specific stocks. Instead, her interview included the offbeat question “What led you to minor in philosophy?” She described the thrill of breaking down an argument and questioning the logic underlying certain claims. At last, Vora could take the conversation beyond earnings estimates and compound-growth rates. She needn’t hide her fascination with Nietzsche or her decision in college to write a twenty-page paper on his concept of the double will. In the course of her interview cycle with this unusual outfit, the recruiters told her, essentially, If you work at our firm, you’ll have a lot of careers here. We want to see what sort of intellectual curiosity you have.
When a job offer ensued, Vora agreed to join Morningstar, a Chicago investment firm where philosophy minors are welcome. The company was started in 1984 by Joe Mansueto, a UChicago graduate who thought the world needed better analyses of mutual funds. Early on, Mansueto ran a four-person operation out of his apartment, doing much of the work himself. Today, Morningstar employs more than four thousand people in twenty-seven countries and is the showcase tenant in a downtown Chicago skyscraper. Mutual-fund research remains at the core of Morningstar’s business, but the firm has expanded into half a dozen related areas.
Morningstar likes to hire liberal arts graduates with a wide range of backgrounds—people who studied Degas paintings or Chilean literature in college, for example. The Chicago company makes room for people who picked up a PhD in religious studies before deciding they didn’t want to be ministers. As long as you’re curious, energetic, and eager to take on the next challenge, Morningstar is refreshingly open-minded about whatever domain inspires you. Since its founding in the late 1980s, Morningstar has thrived by hiring liberal arts graduates who embody the best of critical thinking.
Such corporate cultures don’t happen by accident. In the course of researching this book, I studied about two dozen havens for liberal arts majors. They span a wide variety of industries and range from start-ups like Etsy and Slack to corporate mainstays such as IBM and McKinsey. For good measure, the list includes nonprofits such as Teach for America and government agencies such as the State Department. It even includes iconoclasts such as Enterprise Rent-a-Car and McMaster-Carr, the industrial-supply company. All together, these enterprises fit into ten major categories, which we will examine shortly.
All these companies share a belief that business success hinges on the central elements of a liberal arts education: wanting to work on the frontier, being able to find insights, choosing the right approach, reading the room, and inspiring others. These companies seek a workforce that stretches beyond the formal disciplines of business and engineering. They want people like you.
Yes, it may take a little longer to train you in the particular ways of your new employer if you’ve spent the past few years reading Balzac instead of balance sheets or if the term conversion rate makes you think of religious sects instead of sales prospects. No matter; liberal arts–friendly employers understand. They realize you are able to master new material in a hurry. When such companies hire you, they believe your inquiring nature will soon result in valuable contributions.
Morningstar makes such aspirational hires all the time. Jim Murphy joined in 2008 after exploring Central Asian foreign policy at the University of Colorado. When he started out in phone sales at the company’s Chicago headquarters, he wondered why the firm had bothered hiring an international relations major like him. A few months later, Murphy won a transfer to London in a new job all about face-to-face selling. Voilà! British clients liked chatting with an American who knew the difference between Whitehall and a white paper. “I could go to the pub without being the dumb American,” Murphy told me. “That gave me credibility.”
Emory Zink joined Morningstar in 2015 after stints as an English teacher in rural France and Gainesville, Florida. There’s some finance in her background too: an MBA at age twenty-eight and a stint creating thought-leadership pieces for a pension-consulting company. She still defines herself by her college pursuits at Indiana University (BA in French and comparative literature), though, and that’s fine with Morningstar. In her job as a bond-fund analyst, Zink enjoys the freedom to create zesty videos about her findings. No talking-head tedium for her; on camera, she explains everything with an educator’s clarity and verve. When I asked her to cite a favorite author, she instantly replied: “I love Nabokov! Who doesn’t?” Giggling at her own wit, she added: “I can say that around here. It’s one of the things I love about this place.”
If you’re wondering why companies such as Morningstar dare stretch the usual hiring boundaries, there’s a simple answer. These employers have been recruiting wide-ranging generalists for a long time, with good results. As a result, they have grown comfortable with the (big) opportunities and (not-so-big) risks of bringing liberal arts recruits into the mix. Teach for America is famously willing to cast a wide net when it hires fresh-out-of-college graduates to become instructors in challenging school districts. That boldness has its controversial side, and not every TFA placement succeeds. Even so, TFA’s champions argue that the successes outweigh the stumbles. This charge-ahead mentality can be traced back to TFA founder Wendy Kopp, who launched the enterprise in her senior year at Princeton. She was a sociology major who saw a need and dared imagine how it could be addressed.
McKinsey, the buttoned-down management consulting firm, has traveled this path too. Its appreciation of impractical majors has grown since Kara Carter, a University of Virginia anthropology graduate, joined the consulting firm in the 1990s. Carter spent seven years as co-leader of the partnership’s vast health-care practice before leaving in late 2016 to become chief impact officer at the California Health Care Foundation. Her success makes it a lot easier for McKinsey to invite other anthropology majors into the firm. By LinkedIn’s tally, the eleven-thousand-employee consulting firm now employs two hundred and seventy of them.
Inside many companies, the best advocates for your candidacy are likely to be the top bosses, people far too senior to fret about your week-one productivity. Just ask Bridget Connolly, the international relations major who landed a job as wikiHow’s globalization manager at age twenty-three. Her offer didn’t take shape during her first interview with her eventual boss. It emerged, out of the blue, in a wide-ranging conversation with the company’s president. Such moments of serendipity get likelier as you and your liberal arts background command higher-level attention. After all, senior executives are paid to think about strategic opportunities. Their horizons extend beyond this month’s needs. They are more likely to appreciate how widely you’ve traveled, how many new ideas you’ve wrestled with, and how ingeniously you’ve come at the world’s major challenges.
If you’re interviewing at Morningstar, an hour with John Rekenthaler would fit the bill perfectly. The burly man with thick glasses and a fondness for blunt language joined the company in 1988 as employee number eighteen. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania and two advanced degrees from UChicago; today he is vice president for research. When I asked why Morningstar liked liberal arts graduates, Rekenthaler responded with rapid-fire reasons that resonate with all we’ve discussed so far. “Liberal arts graduates are comfortable with ambiguity,” he told me. “You can give them something that isn’t fully shaped and tell them: ‘Go figure it out.’ And they do so. That’s not true with other disciplines. Second, liberal arts graduates are good at weighing evidence and setting priorities. They can evaluate things. Third, liberal arts graduates have a sense of context and history. That’s important for investors. You need an ability to step back and look at the context.”
Every June, when Morningstar’s latest batch of college talent reports for work, company founder Joe Mansueto takes an hour to welcome these sixty-or-so new employees… and to share some thoughts about why his enterprise is put together the way it is. I slipped into the back of a large conference room to watch one of these sessions, curious to see what else he might reveal about the company’s intense connection to the liberal arts community. Are Morningstar’s values so idiosyncratic they don’t apply to any other company? Or is Morningstar a useful model for how other enterprises can take a fresh look at how they hire? Here’s what emerged.
At the outset, Mansueto does not dazzle. He’s a small, wiry man with thinning brown hair, big, twinkling eyes, and a slightly goofy grin. Dressed in rumpled chinos and a pale blue polo shirt, he looks more like a motel clerk than the man in charge. It’s hard to comprehend that this genial, unassuming fellow is worth more than two billion dollars. Even Mansueto seems faintly amused by the realization he’s become…important.
Then Mansueto starts talking. His face lights up. He comes across as remarkably happy and serenely confident in the strategies underlying his business. “We hire smart, hard-working, curious, creative, and passionate people,” he declares. “My message is to engage. There’s a lot to take advantage of here. Lots of opportunities for stretch projects.” The founder pauses for a moment, then races through a chart of Morningstar’s many, many lines of business. Project names and business statistics are dripping off the chart in all directions. Mansueto shrugs. “People may say: ‘You’re trying to do too many things.’ But to my view, it’s a great strength.”
As the boss’s presentation concludes, someone asks Mansueto how Morningstar ended up with its unusual name. Mansueto smiles. He gets a slightly dreamy look on his face. In his mind’s eye, he is eighteen again. It’s a cold December afternoon. He’s curled up in a chair in UChicago’s Regenstein Library, working on his assignments. Even though it’s well short of dinnertime, the sun has begun to set.
“It was my first year at UChicago,” he recalls. “I was reading Walden. I had so many questions about the book. I was inspired by the way Thoreau wrote it. I wanted so much to see how he would finish it. I got to his final line: ‘There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.’ I thought: What the hell does that mean? And then I realized he was saying even something that has been around as long as the sun is still in its infancy. What I took away is that no matter where you are, you still have a bright future.”
Literature. Optimism. A first stirring of a business that now employs four thousand people. Who says liberal arts values can’t translate into a great career? Think of these ten types of businesses as places where your chances will be especially good.
Start-Ups in a Hurry
If you like working on the frontier, seek employers that share your addiction to what’s new and unexplored. In boom times, venture capitalists pump fifty billion dollars a year into newly minted companies hoping to accomplish something remarkable. News sites such as TechCrunch and VentureWire tell you who is raising money; publications such as Inc. and Fast Company tell you which businesses are growing fast; free online directories such as Crunchbase make it easy for you to sort by industry or geography.
It won’t take you long to create a substantial list of start-ups that sound enticing. Earlier chapters in this book have highlighted businesses such as Paint Nite, which transforms the way we party; Qualtrics, which puts high-powered survey tools in everyone’s hands; and Slack, which promises a faster, easier, and more enjoyable way of handling routine workplace communication. Those companies (and many other pioneers, such as Airbnb, Uber, and Snap) repeatedly turn to people with liberal arts backgrounds for selling, marketing, or designing new services. At Slack, someone needed to ensure that Slackbot, the company’s jaunty yet kindhearted digital assistant, got its banter just right. The answer: Anna Pickard, a dramaturgy major whose previous paying jobs ranged from online cat impersonations to blogging for the Guardian.
As satisfying as it is to create a list of desirable start-ups, getting noticed will be the hard part. Most of these companies operate on such rapid internal clocks that their hiring processes can be an incomprehensible blur. Don’t expect to find their representatives waiting patiently at a campus job fair, hoping you will stop by. Don’t count on them reading your résumé if you send it in unsolicited. Don’t look for them to offer interview sign-up lists—a month in advance—at your career center. To win a full-time job or even a seasonal internship, you need to demonstrate your resourcefulness.
In the e-book Becoming a Rare Find, I talk about ways of winning an employer’s attention when a traditional résumé submission is likely to be useless. Hunt for intermediaries (like alumni, professors, or family friends) who can make introductions for you. See if you can wrangle a get-acquainted conversation even if there aren’t any job openings at the moment. Make the most of non-weird opportunities to meet in person, such as industry conferences. Strike up rapport with customer-service representatives, administrative assistants, or other people who may not be powerful in their own right but who can put in a good word for you—if your interactions with them warrant their doing so. Finally, imagine what you could do at the start-up right away, if you got hired. Then propose this idea as the basis for bringing you on board as an intern. As Forbes.com careers columnist Liz Ryan points out, most hiring happens because companies need fresh talent to address a “pain point” in the business. If you can find that pain point and propose a solution, you’ve taken a big step forward.
Bear in mind that start-ups are notorious for long hours and less-than-ideal pay. Many fail; others never become as successful as their founders hoped. Even so, the explorer’s spirit can carry a small young enterprise remarkably far. That’s what venture capitalists are counting on when they bankroll unproven young companies. Most of that money is meant to be spent on the best possible way of improving these start-ups’ chances: hiring fresh talent like you.
Putting Tech into Action
Can big companies thrive on the frontier of change too? That’s seldom what they do best. Inertia takes hold when companies get larger and older. It’s easier to extend time-tested successes instead of mustering the courage required for fresh starts in unfamiliar markets. Even so, there are exceptions. If you want to work on the frontier while savoring the security, perks, and resources of a big company, take a close look at enterprises determined to have it both ways: business-service firms with a high-tech twist.
This cohort consists of companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard Enterprises, Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Accenture, Ernst and Young, and KPMG. Some started out as computer makers; others began as accounting firms. Either way, all now specialize in helping corporate clients install new technologies that make everything run better. Go to work for one of these companies, and you’ll spend three months in Atlanta, do another stint in Houston, and perhaps even get some rotations in London, Beijing, or Buenos Aires. You’ll get good at scoping out problems, drawing up solutions, and working around the clock to make everything fit into place.
Does that sound like a good match for your liberal arts education? Everything clicks when you realize the secret to keeping these giant implementation squads on the road, year after year. The only way to sustain such a business is to champion whatever new technology needs to be adopted in a hurry. Buzzwords keep changing. Software as a service gives way to Mobile first gives way to Machine Learning and so on. Top executives at these companies can’t predict what they will be installing five years from now. They know they need adaptable, resilient minds that can get up-to-date on the next breakthrough technology, again and again—as many times as it takes.
If you’ve got a background in history, political science, linguistics, or even archaeology, your mind is wired the right way for such work. Think of Oliver Meeker, the sociology major who turned into a blockchain evangelist for IBM. He didn’t earn that position because he knew more about the intricacies of blockchain software than IBM’s engineers. IBM prizes him because he masters new concepts quickly—and explains them lucidly. Generalists like him rotate from project to project, summoning up the perfect blend of analogies, historical context, and acronym-free exposition to make clients feel smart too.
Similarly, Deloitte has been widening its hiring sights the past few years to look beyond the four core disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and math that make up the STEM fields. Now, says the company’s chief information officer, Larry Quinlan, Deloitte prefers STEAM, in which A stands for the arts.
CACI International, a Virginia defense-sector contractor that specializes in tech implementation, has at least 270 English majors, 150 history majors, and 30 philosophy majors on its payroll, according to LinkedIn. True, those liberal arts degrees aren’t nearly as common as the engineering backgrounds that define the bulk of CACI’s twenty-thousand-person workforce. Still, if you’re an ardent reader, regardless of your degree, your passion for books can strengthen your candidacy. Need proof? Take a look at these three interview points, which have become part of CACI’s standard protocol for certain job candidates.
• Do you consider yourself a good writer? Outside of school, what other kind of writing have you done, and for how long?
• List three ideas that interest you. Elaborate on the first idea you listed.
• Identify two items you read recently that you found interesting.
Find yourself in the midst of such an interview, and you’ve got a lot of room to win recognition for all of the supposedly impractical aspects of your college education.
The Financial Elite
You’re alarmingly well read, with a keenly developed aesthetic sense. You enjoy a spirited intellectual argument for its own sake. You’ve got the kinds of grades that could win you a spot in an elite law or medical school, but you decided to pursue your greatest curiosities in college rather than focusing on a traditional preprofessional program. Having earned an honors degree in something highly impractical, you want a high-paying job that lets you think. Where do you turn?
For ambitious liberal arts graduates, the high end of the investment business is the natural place to look. If you’re interested in hedge funds (a lucrative type of investment partnership), organizations such as Structured Portfolio Management appreciate people like you. Similar opportunities abound at leading mutual-fund companies such as Fidelity, Vanguard, Capital Group, and Dodge and Cox.
Many of these organizations—as noted in chapter 7—are run by people who dashed through college decades ago in much the same fashion that you did. As undergraduates, they concentrated on philosophy, art history, or other nonvocational subjects that fascinated them. They knew (or hoped!) there would be ample time later on to transfer their intellectual skills to investing. Your choice of a similar major doesn’t guarantee you a job, but it should earn you a fair hearing.
At Fidelity, seventy-two employees have a big dose of art history in their backgrounds, either as their undergraduate majors or as the centerpiece of a prior job, according to LinkedIn data. (You’ll remember that Fidelity’s CEO, Abigail Johnson, was an art history major herself.) You can find them working as graphic designers, software engineers, stock-plan consultants, equity research associates, and directors of talent acquisition. A few haven’t even needed to repurpose their art history skills; they work full-time as part of Fidelity’s corporate art department.
Show up at Fidelity with an English degree, and you won’t be alone. By LinkedIn’s tally, the company’s 45,000 employees include 1,138 with BAs in English. (By comparison, finance majors clock in at 1,186; economics majors total 1,145.) The numbers for other liberal arts mainstays are surprisingly sturdy too: Spanish, 449; history, 438; political science, 433; psychology, 368; French, 251; social studies, 221; creative writing, 150; sociology, 140; philosophy, 129.
Sometimes, it’s hard to break into the financial elite with a liberal arts background. In that case, you’ll need to make an extra-strong impression in three areas, says Brian DeChesare, a onetime investment banker who provides advice to all comers via his Mergers and Inquisitions blog. First, DeChesare says, establish that “you can do math, and in fact, you’re quite good at it.” Second, explain that you’ve been nursing along a side interest in finance that’s been growing rapidly. Finally, come up with some spark that ties together some aspect of finance with the analytical skills you’ve honed through your liberal arts course work.
In other cases, the financial elite is expecting you. Top-tier hedge funds, according to reports on Glassdoor.com, routinely spice up job interviews with questions such as Should police departments have access to firearms?, What do you think about grades?, and Is the existence of terrorist organizations like ISIS inevitable? These queries arise in free-ranging group debates that feel more like college seminars than conventional job interviews. You need to make sure your voice is heard, but you don’t “win” the argument by shouting louder than anyone else. You succeed by building on other people’s answers too. Bonus points if you can bring to light hidden assumptions and treacherous definitions. Get hired, and you will be expected to tackle similarly complex, nuanced questions, as long as they have clear investment implications. If you’re hunting for investment insights about Alphabet/Google, that calls for a point of view about the future of online advertising—which then invites you to reflect on how the human desire to be informed and entertained will evolve over the next five to ten years. Puzzle over the investment case for oil stocks, paper mills, or restaurants, and it won’t take long to stretch your mind in equally elastic ways.
Nobody comes up with the right answer in every situation. All the same, your bosses will pay you a lot of money if you possess the analytical acuity to be right 65 percent of the time instead of being no better than a coin flipper.
The Problem Solvers
Nordstrom needs to save money. The elegant department store is facing a profit-margin squeeze, and its top executives have decided to target store-cleaning expenses as a prime area for savings. You’ve been tasked with finding a way to cut costs by 50 percent without ruining Nordstrom’s appeal to customers. What do you do?
Work at a management-consulting firm such as McKinsey, Bain, or Boston Consulting Group, and such problems will become your daily obsessions. Should Starbucks sell ice cream? Should a concert hall lower ticket prices or raise them if it wants to boost overall revenue? Business predicaments keep coming your way as fast as you can handle them. You and your colleagues are the outside experts who are summoned when big companies (and an assortment of other clients) aren’t sure what to do.
If you are a liberal arts major, you have come across something like this before, no? Major in anything from classics to sociology, and your most memorable academic experiences are likely to involve deep explorations of murky subjects. You’re not frightened of incomplete information, haphazardly organized material, and provisional hypotheses that collapse on themselves as you dig deeper into the situation. (Annoyed, perhaps, but that’s different.)
Consulting firms go out of their way to find people like you. Back in the days of wing-tip shoes and narrow ties, the top-tier consultants did most of their recruiting at Ivy League schools or a small cadre of similarly elite institutions. Now Bain recruiters can be found at more than a dozen state universities, including Colorado, Florida, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Recruiters don’t camp out solely at the business school; they make time to meet with liberal arts majors too. After all, you already know how to define the objective, set up analytical frameworks, gather information—and then embark on a hunt for the right solution.
Opportunities for liberal arts graduates aren’t limited to the traditional Big Three strategy consultants cited at the top of this section. Other names worth keeping in mind include A. T. Kearney, Bridgespan, Eagle Hill, Protiviti, Kurt Salmon, Censeo, and Innosight.
Save a moment’s consideration for ReD Associates, a Danish consulting boutique with a sizable New York office. One of its co-founders, Christian Madsbjerg, draws frequently and quite publicly from the writings of philosopher Martin Heidegger as he advises some of the world’s largest beverage, sporting-goods, and electronics companies about what to do next. ReD’s consulting team is loaded with people who majored in anthropology, urban studies, or international relations. When I asked Madsbjerg why, he lauded liberal arts training as invaluable for “synthesizing complex sets of data into decisions.”
Storytellers with Numbers
What can you do with a geography major from the University of Vermont, or a psychology degree from Montclair State, or a fine-arts concentration from the University of Miami? For that matter, let’s add in a double major from the University of Washington in industrial engineering paired with painting and drawing. No matter what you studied, you will be welcome in the booming new field of data visualization if you can turn numbers into eye-catching charts, infographics, and full-fledged stories.
If you’ve mastered the craftsmanship that makes a powerful story ring true, you are halfway there. If you are comfortable with Excel and regard statistics as “the good side” of math, you enjoy all the foundational skills you need. Corporate managers in every industry are picking up books like Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic’s Storytelling with Data and saying: “We should be doing this!” Influential business-school professors such as Stanford’s Jennifer Aaker are championing data-based narratives as a way to “resonate with audiences on both an intellectual and emotional level.” Purists may still be trying to write the great American novel, but if you want an easier path to fame and glory, why not set out to create the great American infographic?
Think of yourself as a chef in a high-end kitchen, seasoning your central ingredients (words and numbers) with visual garnishes that bring excitement and clarity to your message. Arrows link your ideas; quote bubbles lighten the mood; cartoons stir people’s emotions. You’re exploring a new communications form that hasn’t been fully defined yet. Your best work is energetic without being chaotic; your biggest hits may be seen by millions of people. Entertainment companies such as Comcast and Netflix want your skills; so do media companies such as Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, and the New York Times. If you bring the imagination and “good eye” that a liberal arts education can instill, you don’t need a PhD in applied mathematics to become part of a productive team in this fast-growing field. Arrive with the standard amount of statistics necessary to get a degree in psychology or other research-intensive social sciences, and you can be a credible candidate for many, many data-related jobs.
Chapter 5 highlighted the ways that advertising and public relations firms such as Porter Novelli are hiring liberal arts majors to extend their data teams’ storytelling power. Make the rounds of other industry leaders such as FCB Group, TBWA, Ogilvy, and Group M, and you will find many more openings. Widen your list to include e-mail marketing, and companies such as MailChimp, HubSpot, and the Creative Group may catch your eye.
Finally, take note of companies like OpenTable, which deploys battalions of customer-relationship specialists to deliver a blend of business metrics and bonhomie. You will find something similar at companies such as Zillow (local real estate prices), Medallia (customer-service rankings), and PayScale (job-specific salary data). Raw data is everywhere. All these numbers become valuable only if someone like you can sift through sentiment scores, revenue trends, demographic changes, et cetera—and clear out the clutter. Draw users’ attention to the trends that matter most, and your audience will be grateful.
Media Companies
Is anyone in media still hiring? Limit your focus to traditional print publications, TV stations, and book publishers, and the answer is depressingly downbeat. Advertising revenue has dried up. Budgets keep shrinking. Even if editors or producers want to hire you, they seldom have the money to offer you a solid starting salary and a full-time job. Ramble through Wikipedia biographies, and you can find long-gone reminders of the days when aspiring writers could master their craft—and make the segue from college to career—by joining the staffs of big-city newspapers willing to hire just about anyone. It worked for Ray Bradbury. It worked for Susan Faludi. For most of us, though, that path has gone the way of carbon paper and rotary-dial phones.
Define media more broadly, and your opportunities haven’t diminished at all. Get to know Bloomberg News, which was built by founding editor Matthew Winkler (BA, history, Kenyon College) and more recently has been led by John Micklethwait (BA, history, Oxford University). Its core audience consists of bankers and brokers paying $24,000 a year for Bloomberg terminals that provide up-to-the-minute financial news, so it’s unlikely that you will be covering the White House or joining the Paris bureau for your first job. Make peace with the company’s somewhat regimented culture, and opportunities keep getting better. You will find plenty of liberal arts majors at Bloomberg who thrive on beats that range from investigative reporting to the arts and education.
Digital-media companies grow amazingly rapidly when everything is going right, but they can shrink or vanish in a matter of months if luck turns against them. It’s the nature of their business. Game-changing shifts in reader or advertising tastes typically take a decade or more to play out in traditional media; they can happen in one-tenth the time online. As a result, don’t expect to spend thirty years with a single employer. Vox, BuzzFeed, Vice Media, Huffington Post, and Business Insider all were hiring briskly in 2016; their destinies a decade from now are bound to diverge. Keep updating your skills and stay connected with people who can alert you to the next big opportunity if and when you need to make a switch. For a more detailed look at how to sustain a stable career in an unstable industry, see chapter 13, “Getting Paid Properly.”
Start-Up with a Soul
What’s the social responsibility of a business? A half century ago, free-market economist Milton Friedman famously dismissed that question as misguided and outright destructive. In his view, a company has only one responsibility: “to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” That’s it. No need to get involved in social initiatives unless they help the bottom line, either right away or at some point in the future. If the previous four sentences leave you sputtering with indignation, consider working for the kind of company that takes a wider view. Your best prospect: what we might term a start-up with a soul.
Remember Etsy, the online crafts marketplace that figured prominently in chapter 1? Its CEO, Chad Dickerson, started out as an English major at Duke University. There, former instructor Trent Hill remembers Dickerson as someone who was “interested in finding ways to make capitalism more humane.” Etsy tries to make good on that goal, positioning itself as a way for artisan creators to reach customers around the world without needing big ad budgets or manufacturing facilities to be competitive. Even though Etsy’s listing rules have morphed a bit over the years, upsetting some early merchants, the site still sees its role as supporting a “people-powered economy.” More than 1.5 million merchants sell everything from candles to jewelry on Etsy; many of them are parents taking care of small children at home who gain a toehold in the economy through Etsy’s services.
If you’re looking for a path into the world of social entrepreneuring (in which businesses explicitly work with “double bottom lines” that include nonfinancial goals as well as traditional business metrics), here are three good ways to broaden your contacts. The simplest: read Fast Company magazine, which covers this sector with tremendous verve. The most ambitious: attend the annual Skoll World Forum, a gathering of social entrepreneurs that’s sponsored by eBay co-founder Jeff Skoll through his Skoll Foundation. The craftiest: Follow the Skoll community on Twitter via @SkollFoundation and #SkollWF. Reach out to people making headway in areas that matter to you.
Ambassadors to the World
How do you feel about books? This is not a trick question. It’s a sincere effort to find people who keep widening their knowledge by reading incessantly. Never mind what harsh words might have been hurled your way in eighth grade. Your moment has arrived. You needn’t hide your secret fondness for the college classes with the longest reading lists. A big, prestigious employer wants people like you. It’s the U.S. State Department—particularly its fifteen-thousand-strong Foreign Service branch.
Go to work in a U.S. embassy, and you’ll need to know a bit about everything. The American system of government, the host country’s system of government, the right way to eat a meal, the reasons why the Treaty of 1612 is still contentious. Every spring, State representatives fan out across the United States visiting many dozens of college campuses, looking for “adventurous, adaptable problem-solvers.” (Those are the State Department’s exact words, plucked from the first page of its careers website.) Getting hired is a drawn-out, competitive process that requires you to excel at standardized hiring exams and in-person interviews while also passing a background check. You’ll want to get full details from State recruiters or the agency’s website. Before you start that quest, though, let’s savor two parts of the hiring routine that are deliciously tilted in favor of the well-read generalist.
Where else can you ace the entrance exam by knowing whether a stray quote should be attributed to Willa Cather or F. Scott Fitzgerald, whether a certain bit of computer mischief is phishing or a denial of service, or whether the illegal drug trade is worst in Holland, China, or the United States? At last, your tendency to pick up bits of knowledge anywhere you find them is a virtue, not a flaw. In the State Department’s own words, you should be “well-informed and knowledgeable across many disciplines.” The right way to achieve that status: “a solid education and a personal life-habit of reading, learning and expanding one’s understanding of the world.”
No matter how much you have read already, State’s recruiters want to entice you with even more possibilities. Thus, a Suggested Reading List packed with sixty-eight books from every section of a big campus library’s stacks is part of the application. Devour as many as you dare; in the Foreign Service, they all are appreciated. You’ll be pointed toward geopolitical classics such as Why Nations Fail; Guns, Germs, and Steel; Russia Since 1980; and China Goes Global. Make time for some sociology, psychology, and behavioral economics, too, in the form of Immigration Stories, Blink, and Psychology and Life. And be mindful that living abroad will stretch your sense of cultural norms; get a head start with books such as Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands.
You won’t find such ardor for liberal arts values in other government jobs, but even low-key respect for your educational background can help your career hunt. Think of the Commerce Department, the Veterans Administration, the Department of Education, and congressional staffs as some of the government realms where your college choices and strengths can be appreciated.
Nonprofits That Inspire
Each year, Teach for America recruits more than four thousand college seniors, most of whom end up teaching in some of America’s most challenging school districts. At its best, TFA provides an extraordinary opportunity to change young people’s lives for the better. About a third of TFA recruits stay in teaching for the long haul. For the rest, it’s a springboard for everything from school leadership to medical school to creating a start-up.
Organizations such as TFA, AmeriCorps, and the Peace Corps accept graduates with any major, which makes them an intriguing choice if you aren’t sure how to put your liberal arts degree to work. Starting pay isn’t going to make your McKinsey-bound colleagues envious, but if your experience goes well, you will be able to say, “I’m not in it for the money,” with 100 percent conviction. Bear in mind that each recruit’s experience is different. Even in a job that should be inspiring, you may come across angry parents, unruly students, broken desks, and a bureaucracy that seems to do everything except let you teach in peace. If you can find a way to prevail, you will be an unstoppable force for years to come. Try Idealist.org for an up-to-date listing of opportunities.
The Iconoclasts
At the start of this chapter came the observation that liberal arts–friendly cultures don’t happen by accident. One of the most essential nutrients is a willingness to hire for potential and train for skill, typically through yearlong rotational programs. Spend a few months in sales, do a stint in customer service, take on a project for the HR department… and before long, you’ve figured out your new employer’s way of doing things. You’ve also gained specific skills that make you a valuable employee to a particular department. You’re set up for success as measured both by your near-term effectiveness and your long-term potential for promotions.
A lot of big, publicly traded companies have dismantled such management-training programs over the past thirty years. They become natural targets during cost-cutting crusades, when managers’ time horizons shrink. As such programs vanish, the entry path for people with an “impractical” major grows narrower. At thriving private companies, though, it’s easier for management to focus on the long term—and to keep such programs running.
One renowned haven for liberal arts graduates is McMaster-Carr, a Midwestern logistics and supply-chain company largely owned and managed by the Delaney family of suburban Chicago. McMaster recruits from liberal arts schools such as Vassar and Davidson; it seeks out people with high GPAs, and it’s famously willing to consider language, ethics, and anthropology majors along with the usual finance and engineering graduates. Make sure that McMaster-Carr’s long hours and intense focus on business objectives agree with you; the demanding culture isn’t for everyone. Still, take heart from the story of Emily Rapport, a Davidson English major who migrated into technical training at the company and is now a software developer. When she asked managers why they were willing to take a chance on her, they replied: “You can teach people to code, but you can’t teach people to learn.”
Another distinctive hub for liberal arts graduates: Enterprise Rent-a-Car. The St. Louis company hires about ten thousand college graduates a year, making it one of the largest U.S. recruiters of campus talent. People who stay after its one-year management-development program stand a good chance of running a branch office or becoming a corporate manager; people who move on find that their Enterprise time translates into highly marketable skills in project management, budgeting, or sales.
About one-third of Enterprise’s college hires are liberal arts graduates without a business focus. “We’re not specific to major, campus or GPA,” explains Marie Artim, Enterprise’s vice president for talent acquisition. “We focus more on the soft skills. We are looking for someone with customer service and empathy, communication skills, work ethic and flexibility.” If you can multitask well and have a knack for teamwork, even better.