Working for Boston Consulting Group – the second-largest consulting firm by revenue in the world with 80 offices in 48 countries – Christopher Shepherd is surrounded by co-workers with MBAs and other business-specific degrees.
There’s never been a day, however, when he regretted his own liberal arts-focused college education, which started as a dual enrolled student at Washtenaw Community College while he attended Ann Arbor Skyline High School.
“Being grounded in liberal arts makes you more grounded and interested in the human experience,” says Shepherd. “I’m a big believer in a broad education. Your mind is what separates you from a computer. To feed your mind computer-type tasks is a waste.”
Shepherd earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy, Political Science & Economics from the University of Michigan in 2017. The 27 credits he earned at WCC (with a 4.0 GPA) gave him the freedom to expand his horizons during his time at U-M.
Thanks to the seven general education classes he completed at WCC before enrolling at U-M, Shepherd was able to take two six-month foreign exchange trips – studying at both the University of Cape Town in South Africa and Fudan University in China – and still graduate on time.
“Coming in with so many credits from WCC, I was unconstrained in my four years at Michigan,” he said. “I was able to study at multiple colleges because I had a lot of space in my schedule to do so.”
That broad educational experience, Shepherd believes, helped him develop the knowledge and soft skills that have led to his steady rise at the Boston Consulting Group. He started at the organization as an intern in 2015 and advanced to be a summer associate in 2016, a full-time associate in 2017 and a management consultant focused on fashion, retail, food and restaurants in 2019.
Shepherd said studying the liberal arts – which traditionally include the areas of history, literature, writing, philosophy, sociology, psychology, creative arts and more – is like “preparing yourself for the long run rather than preparing yourself for a particular job.”
That attitude about the liberal arts – and his considerable career success – made Shepherd the perfect choice to be a keynote speaker during WCC’s first annual Liberal Arts Week in late October. One story he shared with WCC students is the time a U-M advisor steered him away from the university’s renowned Ross School of Business and instead suggested he remain on a liberal arts path that would prepare him to be a better thinker.
“He told me that my peers in business school may end up with a better job to start, but that I’d progress faster and further,” Shepherd says. “A lot of business is very straight-forward, but how do you differentiate yourself from the crowd?”
Based in Atlanta, Shepherd is currently focused on marketing and has helped brands launch social media and Google search ad campaigns to sell products. He has also assisted in hiring and training marketing teams while working with several marketing agencies across the country.
In 2020, Shepherd took a roughly year-long break from the Boston Consulting Group to help advise the Southern Poverty Law Center on how to strategically accomplish its goals of reducing social inequality and creating a more just and equitable society.
He said his educational path has provided opportunity to have those wide-ranging experiences in his work career.