Hilary Mason '00 featured in "Why a Liberal Education Creates Great Entrepreneurs"

• "Liberal education is an approach to learning that empowers individuals and prepares them to deal with complexity, diversity and change."

Few things are more uncertain than an entrepreneurial endeavor. It's why so many companies pivot, for starters, or shift focus after inadvertently finding a better direction. But scientists are also used to switching gears after an experiment might not produce data to support a hypothesis, and some of the most disruptive scientific discoveries--including penicillin and x-rays--occurred accidentally.

In addition, taking a kernel of an idea and making it a reality requires both abstract and analytical thinking--two things stressed in the humanities. Grinnell College graduate Hilary Mason is a self-described practitioner within the "data science" movement, which she says is "fundamentally about learning about human behavior from the data exhaust that we generate." She's applying this in her role as chief scientist at URL-shortening website bitly.com. "I'm a huge fan of the liberal arts approach of teaching you to think, analyze, and communicate, then sending you out into the world to cause trouble," Mason told The Grinnell Magazine. "My Grinnell education didn't prepare me directly for the work that I'm doing, but it did give me the tools that I needed to focus my curiosity."