At the end of her final year at Mary Washington, English major Jennifer Dockeray Muniz ’94 put the finishing touches on her last assignment – a paper for geography professor Donald Rallis. Then she headed to a computer lab in the basement of Trinkle Hall.
The students would only get credit for their papers if they turned them in using a new tool called email, Rallis had told them.
“We walked to his office to make sure he got it,” Muniz said. “We thought: That cannot work.”
Three years later, Muniz took a temporary job at Apple in Austin, processing orders for the computer giant’s education division. Over the next two decades, she worked her way up to director of America’s Retail Contact Center, today managing 1,000 people.
“The world started changing,” Muniz said. She credits her liberal arts education from UMW with preparing her to change with it.
More and more, companies like Apple are recognizing the value of degrees like hers, which emphasize communication and complex thinking over technical savvy alone.
When she first started out, though, Muniz was a bit of a trailblazer.
“From day one, a huge part of my job was being able to successfully navigate a nontraditional business unit,” she said. “We always say [at Apple] that even if you’re not building a product, we are made of small teams that have the ability to debate, to wrestle with concepts and to synthesize ideas. It’s about being able to form arguments on the fly, to really state your points and simplify.”
Core communication skills, Muniz calls them. UMW also gave her a cultural awareness that some would only grasp a decade or more later.
“I talk to people who say, ‘I studied finance and learned how to do this report.’ I say, ‘I spent a lot of time thinking about sub-Saharan cultures,’” she said. “The University of Mary Washington was a great foundation for me and a great growth experience.”
A glut of media – from new books to national publications – suggest that tech companies more and more are looking for workers with liberal arts educations.
“That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket,” trumpeted a 2015 headline in Forbes.
“From Silicon Valley to the Pentagon, people are beginning to realize that to effectively tackle today’s biggest social and technological challenges, we need to think critically about their human context – something humanities graduates happen to be well trained to do,” according to a story in Harvard Business Review last July citing three new books on the topic. “What matters now is not the skills you have but how you think. Can you ask the right questions? Do you know what problem you’re trying to solve in the first place?”