Gregory Lamontagne, ’07

After graduating in 2007, I took a position in the Investment Management Division of Goldman Sachs in New York.  I left Goldman after a year for a position in the Dubai office of Oliver Wyman, an American consultancy, and have stayed with the company for the last two and a half years, though I have since moved back to New York.  While at Oliver Wyman, I have worked on projects in four industries across seven countries, and have worked on English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking case teams.

When I was interviewing for positions during my senior year, I firmly believed (and still do) that my degree in Comparative Literature was crucial to the success of my candidacy at various private sector companies.  My background in the humanities made me distinctive from other, more quantitatively-focused candidates; allowed me to stress my analytical qualities; and demonstrated my ability to think critically in multiple languages.  Now that I am in a position to screen and interview students applying for jobs with my company, I actively seek out candidates with a solid education in the humanities for the same reasons.  I find that students with a background in creative, critical thought and a willingness to extract useful information from a diversity of perspectives make the best consultants, and in my (perhaps biased) opinion, there was no better program at Dartmouth than Comparative Literature in which to hone these skills.  Comparative Literature is a field in which students must become familiar with broad, sometimes contradictory schools of theory; seek out complicated texts in foreign languages; and parse through an incredible volume of information to develop theses that must not only communicate a unique, unified, and creative perspective, but which must also typically situate themselves solidly within an accepted theoretical framework.  The ability to do this is invaluable in consulting, and throughout the broader business world, and I use the skills I developed in the COLT program every day.