Joseph Blanco graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1992, majoring in economics and government, and later returned to study theology and philosophy. He is currently the president of Secretariat, a business consulting firm.
Despite numerous career changes requiring him to learn new skills and enter new fields, Blanco adapted easily. He attributes this comfort with fluidity to the broad, analytical worldview he gained from his liberal arts education.
Video transcription:
Joseph Blanco: I'm Joseph Blanco, and I graduated in 1992 with a B.A. in economics and what was then called government, now political science.
I have perhaps a very circuitous path to get to where I am. So when I graduated from Notre Dame, I spent three years in the fleet with the Navy — I'd come here on an R.O.T.C. scholarship. I then left the Navy and came back here to Notre Dame and actually studied theology and philosophy, again within Arts & Letters.
After law school, I clerked for a federal judge for a year and then started in the private practice of law. And so that led me through a whole bunch of turns to where I am now, though, as president of Secretariat. The company is rapidly growing in the professional services expert witness field, and so we're almost 600 folks now and operating in 11 countries.
My career, in particular, has involved a lot of career shifts. Present in every one of them was having to learn. When I left the law firm to go to Crawford & Company, I had to learn a whole new industry. I think at the end of the day, why the humanities are so important to today's business is because I don't know what that change is going to be. Your ability to think about that change and process that change is what's going to be able to distinguish you from others. And I think that having that broad liberal arts view of the world makes that more accessible.
As I look back and really think about the kind of, if you will, four areas I studied — political science, economics, theology, and philosophy — it wasn't until I got deeply into them I realized how much interrelation there was. And the farther away from it, the more I think that's true — that there really is an interdisciplinary nature of the world.
I think that they're all different ways to search for the truth. And as long as you're searching for the truth, you're going to end up — or hopefully end up — in the same place. But it really is a bunch of different disciplines when trying to get there.
If I had not come here and explored and been open to thinking and be thinking in new ways, I'm not sure I would have been able to kind of move on with life. And it's been just a wonderful experience to have had that time to really think deeply, and I'll be forever grateful to the College for that.
