Janeflora Henriques was born and raised in Kenya. She came to the U.S. in 2002 to pursue an undergraduate degree in chemistry and biology. “My plan was to be a scientist,” she says. Her studies led to an internship with a recent PhD graduate and research fellow from Stanford University and the publication of an abstract of her senior thesis. The star student—who had no graduate-level training—then found herself working in a lab on a project of her own at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. She was quickly on her way to realizing her dreams. Or so it seemed.
But problems arose: The lab, which focused on research into childhood leukemias, was shut down for lack of federal funding. The bigger problem: Henriques realized that though she enjoyed the intellectual challenge of scientific research, the career wasn’t a good fit. “The work was so individual,” she says. “Depending on your set of experiments, you would have to come to the lab at all sorts of weird hours and you’d be alone—because everyone else had weird hours. Even when most of the team was together, everyone would be in his or her own little corner. I needed a different environment to be truly fulfilled.”
That’s when Henriques began to think seriously about a career in business. In Kenya, with the intention of earning money toward her college tuition in America, she started and ran a small business with microfinance funding. With hindsight, that experience—which she enjoyed—seemed like more than a means to an end. “I became convinced that business was my optimal career path,” she says.
Quick to move forward with a refreshed business career, Henriques came up with a business idea, wrote a business plan, sought funding, and worked to establish a startup, a company that would transfer money from the U.S. to Kenya. “Everything was on track until the lawyer hired to navigate the regulations exposed the pitfalls,” she says. “Any successful use of our platform by a money launderer or any person with criminal intent would invariably result in massive fines, imprisonment, or both.” Based on that report, the financiers pulled their support and the startup fell apart. The silver lining for Henriques (because Henriques always finds a silver lining) was greater professional clarity: “From this experience, I gained a desire to truly understand accounting, the backbone of every business.”
With the help of the Zicklin School of Business, Henriques is back on track, having earned an MBA in June 2012 and secured a full-time position at Ernst & Young.
—Diane Harrigan