The Amazing Adventures of Supergrad

[MountainLaurel]

EMMA CLIPPINGER HAS RECENTLY GOTTEN OFF A 24-HOUR FLIGHT FROM AFRICA, but you'd never know it to look at her. Wearing tall black pumps and an ash gray suit, she commands the stage of a Manhattan boardroom without the slightest sign of jet lag.

Clippinger, a junior at Brown University, is delivering a PowerPoint presentation to a panel of executives at the investment banking firm JPMorgan. On the screen behind her is a photograph of Rwanda, showing verdant fields of bananas and corn. The scene may look healthy, but it's not, the 22-year-old tells the executives. The banana and corn crops are so dominant in that nation that many Rwandans get too much starch and not enough other nutrients.

"This," she says confidently, "is the picture we're trying to change."

Clippinger is a passionate and resourceful young woman poised to make her mark on the world, and the investment bankers are practically salivating as they listen. What Clippinger wants from them is charitable funding to support Gardens for Health International, a nonprofit venture she co-founded with Emily Morell, a junior at Yale, that aims to improve the nutrition of HIV-positive Rwandans by helping them diversify their diets, making the anti-retroviral drugs they take more effective.

What the bankers want from Clippinger is something more complicated and long-term. Simply put, they want her to like them. They want her to understand that investment banking isn't just about making money; at JPMorgan, they say, it's about making money and then giving some of it back to the world. They want her to be their emissary by returning to college and telling classmates how globally oriented and civic-minded JPMorgan seems. And if she likes them enough to apply for a summer internship or a full-time job after she graduates next year, they want that, too.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/03/AR2008060302837.html