KOROR, Palau—When Surangel Whipps Jr. was pursuing an MBA at UCLA in the early 1990s, his classmates were chasing job interviews and lucrative careers. Whipps had something else in mind.
His classmates wondered why he wasn’t interviewing for jobs. He had a simple answer: “I came here to go to school, but my plan was to go back home, help our family business, and then eventually serve the public.”
Whipps was born in Baltimore to an American mothe…