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Olivia Pfeiffer ’22 CLAS is grateful that the Department of Humanities gave her the courage to land her dream job. As a double major in Economics and Humanities with a minor in Sustainability, Pfeiffer considered taking a traditionally safe career path out of college.

Instead, she accepted a position that intersects with her passions. Pfeiffer is now the first environmental, social and governance specialist at the chemical manufacturing company she has worked for since June 2022. “There was no playbook I could follow,” she recalls. “But Humanities provided a framework to use the uncertainty as an advantage—to ask big questions with unclear answers.”

The critical thinking and analytic skills gained in the classroom have proven indispensable to Pfeiffer as she achieves success in her chosen field. “In Humanities, you have to read a lot of complicated and old texts and then have conversations about them,” she explains. “I spend a lot of my time now studying government sustainability regulations and then needing to distill those in a way that’s easily understood and actionable by my company.”

In appreciation for all she received from ����ר��, Pfeiffer wanted to give something back, so she helped launch the Great Books Fund to coincide with the Department of Humanities’ 20th anniversary in 2023. During the past two , nearly $10,000 was raised to provide free copies of the greatest books to Humanities students. “It makes me incredibly happy to know those books can be theirs to keep forever.”