Lena Sene '00 arrived at Bates from Dakar, Senegal, where the average wintertime temperature is 72 degrees. Noticing Sene's thin pea coat one winter day, professor Jim Hughes invited her to join him and his family on a trip to L.L. Bean to investigate the wonders of fleece, Thinsulate and goose down.

Hughes, the College's Sowell Professor of Economics, helped give Sene comfort from the storm. He also booted her out the door, so to speak, four years later. As a senior economics major, Sene was torn between joining a Wall Street firm or a Maine-based insurance company where she'd interned.

"Lena had gotten very comfortable in Maine," Hughes told Bates Magazine in 2004. So he pushed his student toward Manhattan — "the greater opportunity," he says.

Today, Sene is an investment representative in Private Investment Management for Lehman Brothers, and in 2006-07 won appointment as a White House Fellow. She is a founding member of Network 20/20, a group that identifies emerging U.S. leaders across various fields and offers them opportunities to engage in substantive public diplomacy discussions with peers around the world.

When Sene finally opted for Wall Street, her choice reflected, in the best Bates tradition, an awakening to "what you're really passionate about," says Hughes. "Lena found something that she sees as a path to where she wants to be 10 or 15 years from now: involved in economic development in Senegal, and Africa."

By graduation, Sene was ready for the challenge. "At Bates, I sat on the sidelines at first," she recalls. "Then I realized that I could sit here and never meet anyone, or I could approach people. It's hard to make the first step to become involved, but once you do it, it's worth the effort. Bates taught me to be a leader, quite frankly."