Cortney Terrillion’99 doesn’t work for a living. And her employee, Nestle Waters North America, is thrilled.

 “If you do what you love, you never "work" a day in your life,” says the marketing manager for innovation. “Passion nearly always translates into positive business results and helps you bring excitement to the work you do.”

As she recently told a standing-room-only gathering of parents and students who attended a Family Weekend Alumni Career Panel, Cortney is the project manager for new products for the multinational food and beverage company.  She “does nothing,” she says with a laugh, except make sure the scientists, finance staff, advertising staff and all others involved in imagining, creating and bringing a new product to market are working well together. And she sees a direct correlation between her career and her major in physics. Yes, physics.

My major required “intellectual curiosity and the hunger to understand the way things work.  A systematic approach to problem-solving and understanding is a good way to ensure that all possibilities are discussed,” she says.

Intellectual curiosity certainly makes sense in a science environment, but business?  “I feel that I have a better background in cross-functional settings, Cortney adds.  “The liberal arts education embraces a teamwork environment, which is highly valued in business today.  There are few problems in business that can be solved through the efforts of one person, so the better you are at bringing functional experts together and sharing knowledge, the more likely you are to succeed.”

Cortney travels throughout the world to accomplish her responsibilities, and spent two years in Switzerland, having never studied French.  Liberal arts to the rescue; Cortney felt confident she’d learned how to learn, and within a few months, achieved fluency for her new life.