Does digging into the past and into the ground prepare you for life at lightning speed? It may sound unexpected, but for one graduate of the McCausland College of Arts and Sciences, her varied background in the humanities helps her everyday as a connoisseur of multitasking technology.

Mary Ann Fanning studied history, anthropology and Japanese at the University of South Carolina anticipating a future in archaeology. Instead, for the past 12 years, she’s built a career in technology and sales. She uses the same skills that once helped her interpret the past — context, storytelling, critical thinking and understanding different perspectives — to solve problems at a software firm and navigate a rapidly changing, “AI-forward” future.

As a student in the McCausland College, she was drawn to disciplines that gave her opportunities to explore both the past and the people who inhabited it. History also challenged her to make connections across events, sources and perspectives that didn't always appear connected at first.

“History is about weaving together and understanding context and threading together things that are seemingly unrelated. That’s basically what I do every day at work.”

In her role as director of commercial operations at Notion, helps the sales team close deals with corporate clients while considering pricing, customer needs and how different teams will respond to a proposed deal. An engineer may have one concern, finance may have another. A salesperson may be focused on something else entirely. Fanning must figure out how to make them all work together.

She likens the process to analyzing competing groups in history. Who has a stake in the outcome? What pressures are shaping their decisions? What information might be missing?

“You have to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, understand what they’re concerned about and figure out how to bridge the gap,” Fanning said. “I’m constantly thinking about how we got here, what are the perspectives and personalities I’m navigating and what is important to the stakeholders in the conversation.”

Thriving in a career that wasn't in the plan

The connection between the humanities and technology was less obvious when Fanning graduated from USC in 2008. She spent that first year working in cultural resource management, surveying land in South Carolina and Georgia to identify sites with archaeological significance. She then went to UC Santa Cruz to pursue graduate work in archaeology.

By 2009, nearby Silicon Valley was in the early years of a transformation. The iPhone arrived, and the expansion of apps created an energy around experimenting with what technology could do. She entered the tech industry soon after.

She started in email security, then moved into networking and analytics before eventually joining Notion, a California-based software development company that specializes in automated project management. Each move took her further from the career she once imagined, but the questions that interested her — how people think, what shapes their decisions and how different pieces of information fit together — continue to steer her curiosity.

Fanning expects her own work to continue evolving with technology. Her response is to experiment with where AI can help while continuing to invest in the work that requires a deeper understanding of people and situations.

“What AI often misses is context. The things I’m really strong with, storytelling, presenting an argument and analysis, those skills still have a lot of value,” she said.

Her advice to today's students is to give themselves room to adapt. Take the entry-level opportunity. Learn some practical technical skills, whether that's AI, Excel or another technology. But don't assume the job market or their own interests will remain fixed.

Fanning saw that volatility firsthand. When she entered USC in 2004, computer science was still feeling the effects of the dot-com crash. Years later, computing skills became some of the most sought after in the workforce.

Her own career developed amid those shifts, one opportunity at a time. Archaeology took her to California. California exposed her to technology. Technology gave her new places to apply the curiosity and analytical habits she had been developing all along.

None of those steps required Fanning to know exactly where the next one would lead. Her advice for students facing that same uncertainty is much simpler: “Be the person who tries.”