So how did this El Salvadorian native, having moved to New York as a child to avoid the perils of a civil war, end up with a degree in Greek and Humanities and move quickly into the upper echelons of the consulting world?

“It’s kind of an interesting story,” Alvarenga said modestly. Like most of his high school classmates in New York City, Alvarenga planned on going to Cornell. But on prospective student day, he was overwhelmed by the size of Cornell. Then he visited Hampden-Sydney. “They were so eager to have me visit,” he said, “despite the fact that I was a Yankee.” In response, he cancelled his Cornell application, discarded his southern stereotypes, and came to Hampden-Sydney. Originally he had planned to go pre-law, but having Dr. Arieti as his freshman advisor sparked his interests in another area. “He’s the guilty party for my Greek major,” Alvarenga said. His selection of the Humanities curriculum resulted from his wide range of interests. The decision to make it his second major was solidified when he was told by another professor, “No one does the Humanities program, because it is too hard.”

After graduation he won a fellowship to study Classics at Cornell. Two years into his Ph.D. program, the civil war in El Salvador ended, and so he packed up his car and headed south. Once he got to El Salvador, Alvarenga was offered a job as general manager of a bankrupt newspaper. “I got the job by default,” he claimed. “No one wanted to work in El Salvador because it was still too dangerous. You did not dare leave the house un-armed.” The El Salvador News had only a handfull of employees. Because its offices were bombed several times during the war, the paper was operating out of a hotel basement.

Only two years after Alvarenga took charge, the paper had its own building and sixty employees, and was being sold in four different countries. Alvarenga introduced real political reporting to El Salvador; his paper gave by-lines (something that had not been done before out of fear that a reporter might gain a following and expect a raise), covered serious issues, and featured the country’s first op-ed page. They were the first to do restaurant reviews, too. “You’d think that would be a pretty safe bet,” Alvarenga said. “But it was one of the most dangerous things we did. I soon learned that you don’t want to tick off a restaurant owner in Latin America.”

The paper quickly began to win awards and gain influence. In 1995 it printed a series on an ex-general who was running for president. The stories exposed his having paid off officials to get a clean financial bill of health. The candidate was forced to drop out of the race, and Alvarenga started getting death threats and bomb scares. Having done his part in helping rebuild the country, he headed back to the States.

An executive at the consulting firm Coopers & Lybrand (now PriceWaterhouseCoopers) had seen Alvarenga discussing the Latin American economy on CNN’s “World Net” and hired him to write a book on economic changes in the U.S. Soon after, the same executive suggested he try consulting.

So Alvarenga was thrust into competition with business professionals, people with MBAs from Ivy League schools who had focused on consulting from day one of their undergraduate years. Although he had to work overtime to learn the “language of business,” Alvarenga had a huge advantage: while others talked about what they had studied, he talked about what he had done. And he quickly stormed up the ranks. After coming to KPMG in 1999, he moved into the executive level and is now the Managing Director for KPMG’s Industrial, Automotive, and Transportation strategy practice.

Carlos Alvarenga, interrupted his graduate studies in classics to return El Salvador; there he revived the country’s main newspaper. After writing a book, he went into high-profile business consulting.

Business education has certainly offered many of his colleagues an advantage on the technical side of the trade. But Alvarenga’s liberal arts background helped him on the personal side. “Sometimes you have only fifteen minutes to convince a client to trust you with a multi-million dollar decision,” Alvarenga said. “You can’t show off how well you did in finance class. What is convincing is how well you communicate—understanding what your client says and presenting your ideas carefully and succinctly. It is one of the most important factors in succeeding in business.”

The higher you go in business, he explained, the more important personal skills become. “The broad view of the world afforded by a liberal arts background allows you to interact with people on many different planes,” Alvarenga said. And in the growing global market, this skill is becoming even more vital. Alvarenga can certainly attest to this fact; his most recent ventures have taken him to England, Denmark, Japan (where he has just returned from giving a speech), South America, and Germany (which he visited sixteen times last year). “People with a liberal arts education can really stand out,” Alvarenga said. “A lot of my colleagues have told me, ‘I don’t know where you went to school, but you’ve received one of the best college educations I’ve ever seen.’ And I agree with that. I rank it at a par with Harvard and Cornell. If you know what you are doing at Hampden-Sydney, you can get a tier-one education.”

The incredibly varied experiences of his life have given Alvarenga fodder for his newest venture: a novel. The story is based on the life of an Italian judge who took on the Mafia and was later killed. “It was written almost entirely on planes going back and forth from Europe,” he explained.

Now that he is in the process of getting his book published, Alvarenga is reminded of how much he misses the publishing world. “I may go back to it someday,” he mused; “the consulting challenge is kind of over, and I need something new to explore!”