Rochester Review • University of Rochester

BALTIC AMBASSADOR: A newly developed Jegendstil-style business center is the backdrop for Ieva Gruzina '03, the executive director of the British Chamber of Commerce, who helps represent about 135 British companies that do business in Latvia.

Ieva Gruzina ’03 knows her introduction sounds like the start of a joke: A Latvian woman with an American accent who works for the British Chamber of Commerce....

“It works as an ice breaker, and always ends up in me launching into a full account of where I am from and how I got here,” says the executive director of the British Chamber of Commerce in Latvia, which represents 135 companies and some 5,000 employees.

For Gruzina, who has been at the post just under one year, the career move brought her back home to a place that has changed dramatically since she was a girl.

She spent her first 11 years in Riga, Latvia’s capital, while it was under Soviet occupation. In 1992 she moved with her parents and brother to the United States, living in Kansas, Buffalo, and Kentucky before studying political science at the University. While in college, she spent four months studying in Brussels and working part time for Bill Miller, a Scottish member of the European Parliament.

“Mr. Miller really enhanced my interest in the UK, and introduced me to Scottish whisky!” Gruzina wrote in an introduction of herself for British Latvian Trade magazine.

The experience led her to England after graduation, to pursue a master’s degree in government at the London School ofEconomics.

Then it was on to Washington, D.C., in 2004, where she spent “a long, long, long, long time looking for a suitable job.” Employers who wanted her job experience weren’t interested in paying the salary of someone with a master’s degree, and those who wanted a master’s degree wanted someone with at least five years of work experience.

Still without that “suitable job” in February 2006, Gruzina landed a five-month assignment in Riga as a representative of the European Commission, the European Union’s governing body. The stint for recent graduates was extremely competitive—6,000 candidates apply for 600 spots—and when it ended, she didn’t want to leave her native country. It had changed so much and was now a breeding ground for young people open to opportunity.

“New companies are popping up all over the place,” she explains. “Foreign investment is quickly pouring in. And people who are multilingual, educated, and willing to take on challenges are in high demand.”

Gruzina, who is fluent in English and Latvian and is pretty good in Russian, has taken on a serious role promoting her homeland as both a business and tourist destination. Besides its impressive history—Riga recently celebrated its 800th birthday—the country’s “amazing entrepreneurial spirit...makes it a very dynamic place to be.”

As the capital of a country known as “the heart of the Baltics,” Riga hosted the Queen and a large Welsh delegation last October, followed by the NATO Summit in November. Gruzina, who covered the summit as a press representative, looks forward to much more activity under herwatch.

Also editor of British Latvian Trade, Gruzina hopes someday to work for the European Commission. For now, she meets regularly with ambassadors and company bigwigs, and organizes charity galas for hundreds of people, hoping to prove herself as the right person for the job despite her age.

“Much of what I am doing, I’m doing for the first time,” she says, “but I’m making a go of it!”

Our Woman in Latvia