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My decision to major in history at Williams was driven more by the quality of the History Department faculty then (1960s), its open mindedness about how you look at historical events, and the fact that many of my closer friends at Williams were history majors. Importantly, thanks to the near heroic efforts of Professor John M. Hyde I learned how to express my ideas in a modestly articulate manner. Success in business comes from many sources, but for me it has mostly resulted from a combination of luck and my ability to develop friendships and business associations with folks who are hard-working, honest and fair, and generally as smart or smarter than me. While these skills have been developed over a lifetime, clearly their foundation was laid at Williams through exposure to a diverse environment fostered by Williams' commitment to a broad liberal arts program.

Following graduation and four years active duty in the Navy I was still undecided what to do as a career. Accepted at both business and law school, I decided to get an MBA at Harvard because it was only two years instead of three. That I had done reasonably well at a school like Williams provided me the luxury to have many career choices. Eventually, I gravitated to agriculture since I had a deep background there from over ten summers spent ranching and farming in Texas and New Mexico. As my career developed I developed expertise in managing large, complex ranching, farming, land and resource operations. The broad array of issues associated with these operations has required modest analytical skills, strong people judgement skills, and decent gut instincts at times. These are skills that I believe evolve from a basic understanding of how the things work (or should work), and why things are the way they are, but not necessarily great technical expertise. Skills, which I believe are at the foundation of a solid liberal arts education. As an aside, I have been CEO of two great historical Ranches, Tejon Ranch in California, and King Ranch in Texas when they have celebrated their 150th Anniversaries-not bad duty for a history major. Also, I continue to enjoy my long service as a Trustee of the Autry Center in Los Angeles-an institution devoted to understanding and explaining the history of the west in all its complexity.

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I graduated from Williams as a history major in 1968. I went on to the Master's Program in Soviet Studies at Harvard, but after two years I dropped out to pursue a career as a cartoonist. This may seem like a strange transition, but to me it has always made perfect sense. Since I was a kid, I knew that being an artist-specifically an artist who works with humor -- was what I really wanted to do with my life. However, this career choice was not exactly acceptable to my immigrant, Jewish parents. When I got to graduate school -- keep in mind this was the sixties, and in Cambridge no less -- I was suddenly exposed to lots and lots of people my age who were making wonderfully free choices based only on desire. For the first time I asked myself what I really wanted to do. I started drawing even while I was still at Harvard, and six months after I dropped out my first cartoon was published in the Boston Phoenix newspaper, where I continue to publish a weekly cartoon today, thirty-six years later.

My interest in history has persisted -- my wife is always stunned when I drag home a five hundred page tome on the English Civil Wars, or a huge biography of Julius Caesar. For me, history is the best kind of storytelling. I love it. I feel that my cartoons have benefited from my education as a historian, helping me to formulate ideas, and most of all, to write clearly and succinctly. In addition, I consider myself a historian of the art of cartooning (in some ways, this unavoidable for the cartoonist, as we are constantly trying to avoid repeating ideas that have been done before). My editor at the New Yorker says that a great cartoon is not only funny, it is also, "about something." Many of my cartoons are about -- directly or indirectly -- perceptions of shared human experience that are rooted in my life-long love of history.

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My name is Barry McCarthy. I'm a graduate of the class of 1975. And while that may seem like a long time ago to you, from where I sit, the time passes more quickly than you might imagine.

I live and work near San Francisco. I moved here nine years ago to take the CFO job at Netflix, which was a small internet startup back then. We have a billion plus in annual revenue now. We were 40 employees back then. 5 of the original employees survived the challenges of rapid growth. Williams was the difference-maker for me.

Before Netflix I worked in management consulting and investment banking and before that completed my MBA at Wharton (that was the first time I appreciated how good the teaching was at Williams). While I couldn't do what I do today without the analytical skills I learned in business school, it's also true that I wouldn't have been successful at Netflix if Williams hadn't taught me how to think, how to write, how to reason deductively, and how to advocate and defend my point of view. Those are skills I began to learn as a history major at Williams. One of my teachers was the history department chair, Russ Bostert. I remember him saying that knowledge is what you remember after you forget what you learned. Of course I've forgotten the countless dates and battles and kings that you'd memorize to complete your history major at Williams. But the process skills I learned as a history student I still use every day, and I never stop working to make those skills better. So by way of example, I have lots of data to digest in running my business (by way of analogy think about the historical dates you'd memorize in prep for a test). After I absorb the data, I have to be able to decide (correctly) what's important and what to ignore and I have to decide what the data means and what to do in response to it, and I have to be able to present my analysis and defend it much like a history major has to interpret historical events and the key milestones which led to some unforeseen outcome, etc.

Like most people my age with similar responsibilities, I've hired my fare share of executives. Of course they don't make it to my office unless they've got the requisite skills and experience. But the good ones, I mean the really strong candidates, are all great thinkers, with good people skills and good verbal skills. And all but the people skills have to be learned. Pursuing a history major could get you started.

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I am writing this in the middle of putting the finishing touches on the fifth mystery novel, which means, obviously, that I have come a long way from my history major days at Williams. Well, yes and no. After graduating, I thought I wanted to be a journalist, but as it turned out, I was happier doing research and academic writing, so I went back to get a master's in art history from NYU's Institute of Fine Arts. After finishing there, I moved to the Ph.D. Program at UCLA, but spent more time writing for art magazines and eventually working as an art critic for the L.A. Times (a job I held for 7 years) than writing my dissertation, so I eventually put that in a drawer. I then worked as the editor of the international journal art/text, while teaching art history and theory at UCLA and Art Center College of Design. After five years of that, I needed another change, so I figured, why not write a novel? It's been a lot of fun. Every step of the way, I've been informed by the kind of rigor and intellectual curiosity that I was exposed to as a history major at Williams. It's no coincidence that the heroine of my mystery series writes biographies, loves vintage fashions and old movies, and is in general, obsessed with the past. Thank you, Williams, for everything!

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I had few doubts about majoring in history. History seemed like the perfect fit for a liberal arts student: The subject at some point touches on virtually every other subject, and I thought (or at least I hope I thought) that the major would be helpful in developing critical-thinking, writing and researching skills. Just as importantly, the department was quite strong, and I became fond of several professors there, including John Hyde and Bob Waite. My wife and I both took Bob Waite's 301 class and were energized by the passion he brought to the subject. John Hyde became a mentor to me, pushing me on some days and encouraging me on others, but above all taking an interest in my development as a student. By the time John Hyde told me during my junior year (or so) that I needed to work on my writing, I was as interested in improving my writing for its own sake as I was in impressing him that I could do it. Had Hyde and Waite been teaching in the theater department, I might well have majored in theater, giving the department its first major who can't sing, dance or act.

Unlike my decision to major in history, I struggled with career choices. I stayed in Williamstown for a semester to be Mike Russo's assistant soccer coach; I worked as a paralegal for a year and a half in Washington, D.C.; I spent a summer working on an archeological dig in Jordan through a State Department cultural exchange program; and I taught high school history and middle school geography for two years. Eventually I settled on law. I attended Ohio State's law school, spent eight years in private practice, divided by a three-and-a-half-year stint as the State Solicitor for Ohio, and became a judge five years ago.

My current job, it seems to me, is a perfect fit for a history major. While lawyers and judges rarely talk about secondary and primary sources, much of what I do turns on determining which parts of a factual record I can trust and which ones I can't. The same is true of debates about the meaning of laws. Efforts to uncover the meaning of the Constitution or a statute not only require historical research but also generate all manner of debates about theories for interpreting that record. What I perhaps like most about my job, however, is the puzzle-solving component to it: trying to think creatively about the fairest and most satisfactory way to resolve a wide range of conflicts. Oral arguments, whether from the perspective of a judge or an advocate, are reminiscent of the intellectual tennis that goes on in a good seminar, as the parties and court try to develop and defend a coherent position. And of course I write and write: On average, I am responsible for writing one to two ten-page opinions a week. If someone had told me in high school that this is what I would end up doing for a living and that I would like it (particularly the writing), I would have laughed. I have Williams to thank for the change.

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After graduating from college, I was torn between the publishing world and the academic world. I pursued a Ph.D. in Medieval studies at Harvard, in which I brought my interest in History and in English (I was a double major) to look at the historical context of hagiographies from the late middle ages. However, after obtaining an M.A. in the field, I realized the ivory tower was not right for me and spent the next 14 years of my life as a children's book editor at a major publishing company in New York. I started as an Editorial Assistant and when I left to move to Chicago for family reasons, I was an Editorial Director and Vice President. I now work as the Development Director for a non-profit organization called the International Justice Network, and work as a mediator at the Center for Conflict Resolution, where I mediate landlord/tenant, neighbor/neighbor, and matrimonial fee disputes, among other cases. Apart from my graduate work, it seems like my history major has had little to do with my job choices, but I do believe that the skills I got from this major, including how to do good research (critical for development work) honing my research skills, trying to uncover the underlying context (historical, emotional, financial) for a particular issue (essential for successful mediation), and learning how to write clearly and carefully, without grandiose or vague statements, but with a point of view (a skill I have used in every job I have ever had) have been with me throughout my careers.

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Williams taught me how to think. History at Williams taught me how to listen. It taught me how to understand people, how to explain the choices they make, and how to identify what forces influence them at any given time. This is a solid foundation for anyone who chooses to influence and lead people or teams of people.

There are no career limitations for the individual who understands history. Research and academia is only one obvious path. Several factors lead me in another direction. After I graduated Williams College I was required to join the Greek armed services and discovered unexpected ways in which my degree had relevance here as well. Later on, I worked in a small R and D firm in Waltham MA performing basic management functions and this lead me to a double Masters in Management and Government. Both degrees involved a strong element of management, which was a necessary addition to what I had done so far. Apart from some heavy dose of mathematics required for Management at Sloan my History background was all I needed to work through my Masters' degrees.

After graduating from MIT, I joined the management team of a fish farm, designing and leading their restructuring program. Then I became a consultant to the Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs, worked in an executive search firm that recruited and evaluated talent for Greek and foreign multinationals and now I head the communications department of the Greek socialist party. They say that our generation will change career paths and average of 5 times in a lifetime. In such a fluid working environment it is tough to identify one sole tool worth acquiring in College. But if I were forced to make a choice, "understanding people" would be it. So far in my career it has been the undeniable foundation for anything I do.

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My name is Stu McLaughlin. I graduated from Williams in 1994 with a degree in history. The history department was a phenomenal part of my wonderful Williams experience. I loved the exercise of trying to imagine what it was like to have been at a specific time and place in the past. And that imaginative exercise carries over into what I do today, which has nothing on its face to do with the study of history.

Today, I am a partner at a small investment firm in San Francisco. Before I connect that with my intellectual roots in the Williams history department, let me briefly explain how I got here. While at Williams, I decided that I wanted to try my hand at business. Right out of school, I took an analyst job with McKinsey and Co, a consulting firm. I spent two years there and then two years at a venture capital firm before pursuing a Masters in Business Administration at Stanford University. When I completed my MBA, I decided that I very much liked the intellectual exercise of investing, in part because it reminded me of much of what I enjoyed in studying history. As an investor, you spend a lot of time analyzing the past in an attempt to better predict the future (e.g., asking why was a business able to grow quickly in the past in order to answer the question will it continue to be able to do so?). You also spend time evaluating the broader competitive and economic context for a company, which is akin to developing an understanding of the historical context for a specific action. Today, I spend time looking at investing in everything from pro sports teams (less fun than you might think) to banks (more fun than you might think) to real estate to consumer products companies. It is a fantastic job that happily draws on much of what I learned from the Williams History Department.

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An inspiring teacher really can change the course of your life. Professor Tom Kohut changed mine by setting me on the path to becoming a historian. As a student at Williams, I took one history class after another with Professor Kohut. The combination of his teaching style, the subject matter (modern German history), and his steady encouragement of my work kept drawing me back. My experience in his tutorial on Wilhelmine Germany during my junior year gave me the confidence to embark on writing an honors thesis my senior year. And that experience propelled me toward the pursuit of a Ph.D. in European history after graduation with one of the great historians of the Holocaust, Saul Friedländer. My undergraduate work in history at Williams prepared me intellectually for the rigors of graduate school. In college I had learned to think through issues with analytical rigor and to express my ideas with clarity and poise. In graduate school I expanded upon my undergraduate experiences in research and writing as I ventured off to different countries in order to decipher the inscrutable bureaucracies that control access to archival collections -- and the handwritten diaries that comprised the source material for my dissertation and first book on Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust. That I was able to pull it off and produce a coherent narrative about the hundreds of texts I had read in the archives is testament to the preparation I had received from my professors at Williams. What is more, the central intellectual problem that haunted me in college, namely, how do ordinary people cope with and make sense of extraordinary events like war and genocide, continues to shape my research and teaching fifteen years later.

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My time at Williams, including my double major in History and Geology, somehow set me on a path to become a successful entrepreneur. After graduation and an 18-month stint at a management consulting firm in Boston, I started a company named Employease with another Williams Alum named John Alberg. Employease was a pioneer in software as a service and delivered web-based human resource applications to small and medium sized businesses. We grew the company over 10 years and sold it to ADP, a Fortune 500 company, in 2006. Then, after running the business for ADP and having responsibility for 700 associates and $150M in revenue, I recently left to start a second venture, also with John. Our new business is named Euclidean Technologies and we aspire to bring quantitative rigor to the world of long-term, fundamental-based investing.

How did my history major prepare me for this career? I think the opportunity to be challenged by professors like Kohut and Dew and incredible students like Ali Garbarini, who was a peer of mine, sharpened my preparation and communication skills. These skills have been invaluable to me when raising money for our business, asking potential clients for the right to serve them, and inspiring our teams to create great things. When you couple these things with the perseverance that comes from having to crank out 5-7 page papers for Professor Kohut each week, I think it is fair to say that my History major prepared me well to withstand the tests of entrepreneurship.

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Like many of my classmates, I was drawn to Williams' history department by an interest in the subject matter. After sampling several courses, I decided, primarily because I enjoyed it, to major in history (as well as political economy). Although I never intended to pursue a career in history, I thought that in focusing on the subject as part of a broad liberal arts curriculum, I would preserve a variety of professional options. Happily, I found this to be the case. After graduation, I worked as an economic consultant. A few years later, I changed course and decided to enroll in law school at New York University. I enjoyed law school immensely, finding the process of analyzing legal precedent (essentially researching and conceptualizing past experience to resolve similar issues in the present) similar to the modes of analysis I learned as a history student. I then worked as a law clerk for a federal Judge in New York. After completing my clerkship, I began my current job as a litigation associate in a New York law firm. As a litigation associate, I have worked on cases spanning several practice areas (e.g., antitrust, consumer protection, immigration, family law) and industries. My job has involved interviewing and assisting in the preparation of witnesses, taking depositions, arguing motions/appeals, conducting legal and factual research, and writing legal briefs and memoranda. I did not expect it, but I have found that more than 10 years after I ended my formal study of history, the methods I learned to critically analyze historical events, conduct research, and weigh evidence from various sources, have proven invaluable in my day-to-day work.

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I always planned to teach. When I was ten, I was going to teach fifth grade -- then middle school -- then high school. So I fell into the idea of teaching college as a matter of course, and settled on teaching history, rather than English or math, so naturally that I don't even remember the process. But teaching college isn't just teaching. To be a college professor, you have to research too, and I hadn't been expecting all my life to be a researcher. Did I even like research? I did a thesis, and found -- yes, I did.

In 1997, directly after graduating from Williams, I began graduate school at the University of Virginia. I had written my BA thesis on Trinidad in the early nineteenth century, and I applied to graduate school planning to specialize in eighteenth and nineteenth century British and French imperialism in the Caribbean. I'm still with it. I'm currently turning my Ph.D. dissertation into a book, and two other major projects are scratching at the back of my mind to be worked on after that, and they all investigate aspects of British-but-used-to-be-French islands in the nineteenth-century Caribbean. That level of consistency is not required in academia, or even that common, but apparently I tend to stick to an idea once I've got it.

One of the best things about history research is the travel. After three years of coursework at Virginia, the dissertation required eight months in the colonial archives in London, and four months in Trinidad, plus a quick trip to Dominica, to be followed by three years of writing. The archives offered another test--did I like the part of research that involved six days a week looking at old pieces of paper? Turned out I did. Assembling a story from fragments, as the same person showed up suing a friend in the newspaper, honored by the government, and writing letters to the colonial office, was surprisingly fun.

Since 2004, I have been an Assistant Professor of History at the Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon, a position that combines the ethos of a liberal arts college (such as Williams) with the room to grow offered by a university. I teach world history from prehistory to the present, and offer thematic courses on slavery and empire and the questions, people, and ideas that sprung from those two phenomena of the modern world.

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I majored in history after my father suggested that above all else after graduation, I would be expected to "think critically and write clearly." Following my interests in military strategy and leadership, I spent my senior year analyzing (marginally critically and clearly) the Spanish invasion of Mexico and the Vietnam War for my senior thesis. Then I promptly accepted a job in consulting.

Fortunately (perhaps predictably) I joined Monitor Group, which focuses on strategic issues for corporate, government and non-profit entities. My practice focuses almost exclusively on the intersection of organizational strategy and leadership. On a global basis, I advise senior managers on issues related to leadership development and team effectiveness, tied to core strategic goals. I have advised organizations across a variety of industries - pharmaceutical, biotechnology, consumer products, professional services, and venture philanthropy. I live in southern California with my husband and two young children (who will soon be introduced to Sun Tzu...when they can read).

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I began to consider a history-related career in my junior year at Williams while taking the required History 301 seminar, and realized the depth of my interest in history that summer while interning at a public policy think tank in Washington, D.C. Although I did apply to a variety of jobs in my senior year, I decided to enroll in a master's program in East Asian Studies at Harvard University, having greatly enjoyed researching and writing nt senior thesis on the university entrance exam system in Japan. At Harvard, I focused on Japanese history and authored a thesis on Japanese war memory. In 1999, I continued at Harvard in the Ph.D. program in history.

I graduated with a Ph.D. in history from Harvard in the spring of 2003, and joined the Williams College faculty that fall. I am currently Associate Professor of History, offering a variety of classes on Japanese history. My book Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860-1960 with Cornell University Press came out in December 2008.

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