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Class of 2014

Varcity Kariuki

In explaining what motivated her to attend TRIUM, Varcity, a Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase, says,

My career has been great in giving me access to the US financial markets, but I also had a strong desire to get broader exposure to successful professionals who are making a difference in a variety of fields across the globe. 

Little did she know that by the end of the TRIUM program, one of those successful professionals would propose marriage to her at the top the Eiffel Tower. For Varcity, a member of the Kikuyu tribe from Kenya, that fateful meeting was yet another serendipitous event in a remarkable journey from her childhood in Nairobi.

Born to educated, middle-class parents, Varcity was schooled by German nuns at a boarding school in Kenya. Her good grades earned her a senior-year exchange program in Minnesota, where her host family helped her integrate into American culture, treated her like a member of the family, and encouraged her to attend Smith College, from which she graduated magna cum laude. “Their unwavering support and constant guidance throughout my undergraduate studies and through my career and life events has been the wind beneath my wings,” Varcity says.

Although she initially planned to teach math or economics, the fast-paced financial world she experienced as an intern at J.P. Morgan appealed to her, and Varcity’s ambition shifted toward making a positive economic impact on people’s lives through financial empowerment. At TRIUM, she continues, “I learned so much that it’s impossible to summarize, but one of the key takeaways for me that I apply in my job is always thinking about the ‘triple bottom line,’ not just the financial bottom line.” A large part of the program’s appeal for her was its emphasis on “doing global business in a socially responsible way without sacrificing long-term financial viability.”

Given her long-term interest in helping provide women in developing countries with access to financial resources, she is encouraged that several of her TRIUM classmates chose Africa-focused capstone projects and that the program has been successful in attracting students who hail from or work in Africa. A booster of TRIUM’s close and active alumni community, Varcity says she is impressed and very encouraged by a planned “Nigeria trek” that a group of students and alumni have scheduled for February 2016 to survey the business climate there.

She notes there are increasingly stable investment opportunities in the developing world, for both multinationals and local entrepreneurs, which she also finds encouraging:

I hope I have the privilege to pursue my ambition to lend my expertise one day, as I now have a great global network of successful professionals whom I can leverage for support and advice.

And one of them happens to be her husband.