Cameroon fund supports defining experience

October 1, 2010

In addition to being a managing partner with Smuggler Films, Amy Nauiokas ’94 serves on the advisory board of the Make-A-Wish Foundation International and is a member of Dickinson’s board of trustees. She’s also currently building a nonprofit named Bubble, which aims to fight childhood obesity in low-income communities.

Amy Nauiokas ’94’s study-abroad experience had all the makings of a disaster. At age 19, she arrived in Cameroon amid the protests, riots and resulting state of emergency that followed the country’s first multiparty elections in 1992. Two days later, the university where she was to study closed its doors for the semester.

“Absolutely nothing went as planned,” she recalls.

Yet today, when Nauiokas looks back on how she rose to the top of the financial world as CEO of Barclays Stockbrokers when she was a mere 34, that would-be disaster stands out as a defining experience.

“I am certain that my time in Cameroon is the number-one reason I was able to accomplish everything I did professionally,” she says, noting how she set up independent-study sessions to complete the experience without the support of a functioning partner school. “I came back from Cameroon an entirely different person in terms of my drive, my motivation, my self-confidence and my work ethic. I felt like I wanted to take on the world.”

To help prepare more Dickinsonians to take on the world, Nauiokas recently established the $500,000 Amy Nauiokas ’94 Cameroon Program Fund. The endowed fund, which supports the program’s cultural excursions, academic programming and internships, is aimed at ensuring that students continue to develop the self-reliance that comes with living in Africa—even in an environment that’s not quite as chaotic as it was for Nauiokas.

“When I speak to students and hear about their trips, even some 15 or 16 years after mine, it’s amazing that people are having the same kind of emotional and academic experience,” she says. “Whether it’s finding housing, finding the right professors or finding an internship, they still face these challenges on their own in a vastly different culture, and they still come out with the confidence that they can tackle anything.”

Having previously made a gift supporting scholarships for the program, Nauiokas sees this new fund as a way to ensure that Cameroon is always a part of Dickinson.

“It’s fabulous to see how the brand of the Cameroon program has stayed alive, and I want to make sure we can do that in perpetuity,” she says. “Hopefully, this fund could even one day allow Cameroonian students to come to Dickinson so that the experience is mutual.”

If Nauiokas is any indication, the impact of the Cameroon experience should last well into the future for many Dickinsonians. Recently, the former international-studies major leaned on her study-abroad memories to tackle a new challenge, leaving Barclays—and the financial world altogether—to help launch Smuggler Films, a film and theatre production company currently developing a movie adaptation of White Tiger and a musical adaptation of Once.

“I knew it was a very big risk to give up a job on Wall Street to do something more entrepreneurial and something I was more passionate about, but I didn’t question it,” she explains. “I thought, ‘This is scary, but it can only make me better.’ I learned from my Cameroon experience that when you put yourself in those scary situations, it leads to something good. That has definitely helped me to make these kinds of decisions—and make them big.”