Why Hire Wofford?

We hear it all the time from employers: "Wofford students are the best prepared for [insert job/project/task here]. We love them. Send us more."

What makes Wofford students so desirable? 

Simply put, they've been taught how to think. Our students receive a liberal arts education that builds leaders and decision-makers by teaching the core competencies of critical thinking, communications, knowledge of self and others, creativity, and collaborative problem solving. 

A Wofford education also instills:

International experience - Wofford boasts a top-ten national rating for travel abroad experiences.
Leadership experience - Wofford students are involved and engaged with over 80 student organizations on campus, most students will have led a program, project, or organization of five or more students.
Servant Leadership - Wofford students and alumni know how to give back! They are leaders on campus and in the community. Every student participates in a first-year service plunge and most continue in one of our many service organizations.
 

But don't take our word for it.  

In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, Tom Golsby-Smith, CEO of Second Road, a business design and transformation firm located in Sydney, Australia, put forth the reasons why companies should hire liberal arts students.  

• "Complexity and ambiguity. Too many companies lack the scope of understanding to stop problems before they start, because their people are too focused on immediate tasks, or buried under so much data that they can't see warning signs. The BP oil disaster, the manufacturing problems at Johnson &Johnson and Genzyme and many others might have been avoided if they had learned to identify ambiguous threats. Any great work of art — whether literary, philosophical, psychological or visual — challenges a humanist to be curious, to ask open-ended questions, see the big picture. This kind of thinking is just what you need if you are facing a murky future or dealing with tricky, incipient problems.
• "Innovation. If you want out-of-the-box thinking, you need to free up people's inherent creativity. Humanists are trained to be creative and are uniquely adapted to leading creative teams. (A case in point: Steve Jobs, who openly acknowledges how studying the beautiful art of calligraphy led him to design the Macintosh interface.)
• "Communication and presentation. Liberal arts graduates are well-trained in writing and presenting, making them natural fits for marketing, training, and research. A focus on writing (which you need for degrees in history, literature, philosophy, and rhetoric) helps people develop persuasive arguments, and a background in performance (such as theater or music) gives people great presentation skills. And an understanding of history is indispensable if you want to understand the broader competitive arena and global markets.
• "Customer and employee satisfaction. The ability to "get under the skin" of customers and employees to discover their real needs and concerns demands something other than surveys, which yield superficial information. Instead, you need keen powers of observation and psychology — the stuff of poets and novelists.
• "What else? A person who has studied a foreign language or literature can run your overseas offices, or help with your global strategy by providing local insight or business analysis. Philosophers can help you with ethics. Historians can help you understand the past while giving you a picture of the future. (Just ask P&G's A.G. Lafley, who once planned to be a professor in medieval and Renaissance history.)"