Jonathan McKeage
1973 BA in English
Vice President for Corporate Development of Digital Angel Corporation
Jonathan F. (Jay) McKeage (Hanszen College) started at Rice in 1969 intending to pursue the traditional pre-medicine track. By his sophomore year, he was still taking plenty of science classes, but was beginning to reconsider his plan: maybe he could focus on a field with rich questions apart from those prompted by career considerations. After a brief turn in Psychology, Jay ended up in the English Department, developing skills in writing and communication, in posing complex questions, and in the analysis and of ideas and human values.
Jay acknowledges that he benefited at Rice from the support provided by the Menil family, including the funding of a new media center and the support for building Rice’s faculty in the humanities, especially in the English Department. In addition, he counts his own classmates as a primary intellectual resource. Coming from a small town in Illinois, he’d “never met so many brilliant people from so many places all over the world.”
Jay did not return to medicine after all, but continued to study comparative literature at Harvard, where he received his PhD 1984, specializing in medieval languages and literature. He also met his spouse in grad school, also in comparative literature. Emily Bailen McKeage went on to be freelance editor and teacher at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.
During graduate school, again new questions presented themselves to Jay, suggesting he take a new direction in his career trajectory. Jay had become interested in the financial markets, motivated by both personal financial planning as well as the larger questions associated with macroeconomic analysis. With the skills and curiosity accrued from the wide-ranging nature of literary study, Jay felt confident enough to try something complete different. As he said at the time, “I didn’t know a stock from a bond.” Still he enrolled in a business administration program at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, in a program specifically tailored for PhDs in the humanities.
With a Certificate in Business Administration from Wharton, Jay went to work on Wall Street, where he held a number of jobs for about twenty years. In recent years, he was hired by one of his clients and now works in-house on that firm’s investment banking projects, as well as handling investor relations.
Business people often use the term “soft skills” to describe cultural awareness, a sense of history, wide-ranging curiosity, flexibility, the ability to relate disparate ideas to one another: just the sorts of skills developed in the humanities classrooms, where questions are large and communication is key. These skills “matters equally if you are trying to do business in China or in Texas.” And these skills are the ones firms like his look for when making hiring decisions.
Jay would like to convey to incoming freshmen at Rice that a humanities degree “is the best preparation for life,” regardless of career, and especially considering the ever-increasing pressures to adapt early to professional specialization. He suggests that students can prepare for a trade after the undergraduate degree. This advice rests squarely on the evidence of his own career.
