Many collegiate student-athletes arrive on campus with lofty aspirations. They might hope to represent their country in international competition one day. Maybe they dream of becoming published authors, or coming up with their own ideas for non-profit organizations and building them from scratch.

Mae Coyiuto ’16, the top-ranked singles player on Pomona-Pitzer’s women’s tennis team, had already accomplished all of that before her first day at Pomona.

The inspiration to become a writer caught hold very early in her life.

“When I was about five years old, my mom got this new laptop computer,” said Coyiuto. “To me, it looked like the shiniest, best toy ever, but my mom told me I wasn’t allowed to play with it. In the morning, though, I would sneak in the living room and play around with the computer. I discovered this magical thing called Microsoft Powerpoint and I wrote my first story on a slideshow presentation. One day my mom caught me on the computer and instead of scolding me for disobeying her, she read my story. From that day on, I never really stopped writing.”

By the time she was 10, Coyiuto was a published author, writing three children’s books in her native Philippines. As she grew older, she was inspired to write a book of short stories at age 16, titled Flight to the Stars.

Even in those early years, Coyiuto knew she had found a life-long passion. Being behind a keyboard allowed her to open up in ways that were perhaps more difficult in real life.

“I’ve always been a person who never really said much, but writing has always been a venue where I can express myself. I can write the most bizarre things, and some might even call it creativity. One thing I love about writing is that no matter how old you are or where you’re from, there is someone out there who will pay attention to what you have to say.”

Coyiuto wasn’t content with merely finding her own inspiration and seeing it through. She wanted others to have the same opportunity, so she started an organization to help build libraries in Habitat for Humanity communities in the Philippines. “The idea of our “Gintong Isip” (Golden Minds) library stemmed from both my experiences with writing and tennis. My biggest role models were some of the kids I met in junior tennis. They all had big dreams of playing for the Davis Cup, ranking internationally or getting college scholarships. I’m very happy to say that some of these kids toured abroad and got full-ride scholarships to the top universities in the Philippines. I think that everyone should be given the chance to dream and strive for something the way these players have.

“I have been terribly blessed to find things that I love so much, and I wanted to help others find their passions, too. I think the best way to do this is through literacy. Exposing people to all kinds of stories can inspire them to dream. My main reason for coming up with the Golden Minds project was to help others (especially children) realize that they have this incredible potential to be whoever they want to be. Through the amazing help of Habitat for Humanity, we were able to put up our first library last summer. During the opening, there were kids there who told me that they wanted to be doctors, lawyers, and one even said she wanted to be the next president. The goal of Gintong Isip is to make these dreams a reality.”

Coyiuto was also an overachiever on the tennis courts at a young age, winning several junior tournaments and representing the Philippines in the Junior Fed Cup in Malaysia in 2010. She still came to Pomona uncertain of how she would fare at the collegiate tennis level, but her very first tournament during her freshman fall alleviated any fears, as she advanced to the semifinals of the ITA West Regionals before falling to the No. 1 seed (Kristin Lim of CMS).

“That tournament will always be one of my best memories in tennis,” she said. “Before coming here, I was really nervous about playing college tennis. But while I was playing in the fall tournament, I knew that I was going to love playing for Pomona-Pitzer. Even though we had been playing for three days and it was over 100 degrees out, every single member of the team was out there cheering for each other. It didn’t matter that it was only my first year on the team or if my opponent was one point away from winning, they were all there for me. I’ve never felt this kind of support until I came here. The support my teammates gave me during that fall tournament helped me start to believe more in myself.”

She felt the same support off the court as well, when tragedy struck last fall. She was thousands of miles away when Typhoon Haiyan (Typhoon Yolanda, as it is known in the Philippines) devastated her home country, and although her family and local community were spared the brunt of the storm, she knew plenty of people directly affected.

“The hardest part about being away during Typhoon Yolanda was hearing about the casualties, seeing the destruction and feeling that I couldn’t do anything to help. Thankfully, my amazing AAMP mentor, Kim Africa [’15], planned a fundraising dinner for the victims. This event made me realize how lucky I was to be part of the 5C community and the tennis team. I was so touched when my professors, even from my freshman year, sent me an e-mail checking up on me and asked if there was any way they could help with the fundraiser.

“Even with all their work and other responsibilities, my teammates spent hours helping me make Filipino desserts for the event. I also reached out to the CMS women’s tennis team, asking if they could donate a basket for the raffle and they made the most beautiful basket I’ve ever seen. Seeing all my friends and teammates at the dinner made me realize that I’ve found my second home in this community.”

Coyiuto played most of her freshman season at No. 2 singles, and led the team with a 17–6 record. As a sophomore this spring, she led the team in wins again (17–8) and moved up to the No. 1 position in singles, helping Pomona-Pitzer to a No. 6 national ranking and an appearance at the NCAA Regional finals. But ask her about specific goals she may have over the rest of her tennis career, and she turns attention away from herself after one sentence.

“I hope to grow more as a player and to never stop trying to get better,” she said. “More than that, I hope that each member of the team meets her goals and loves the sport more and more during her time in Pomona-Pitzer tennis. I want to help continue the tradition of the PP tennis team as an area of support, love and family for each member.”

Providing support and love to the greater community is one area where Coyiuto has always managed to hit a winner.

Before he was cataloguing the nearly 10,000 pieces in the Pomona College Museum of Art (PCMA) collection, museum Associate Director and Registrar Steve Comba was earning a reputation among his fifth-grade classmates for copying Peanuts cartoons and drawing “Wanted” posters of his least favorite teachers—a feat which often got him into trouble. Comba still has a sharp, sly sense of humor, but when it comes to managing the College’s art collection, he’s all business.

Comba never set out to work for a museum. As an undergraduate, he attended the UC Santa Barbara College of Creative Studies, later relocating to Claremont, where he received his MFA in Studio Art from the Claremont Graduate University in 1986. All he wanted was a teaching job that would enable him to pay the rent for his own studio. Until he could find a position, he took a part-time job photographing, mapping and framing prints at the Galleries of The Claremont Colleges, the former museum jointly run by Pomona and Scripps colleges. When two positions at the gallery opened up, Comba inquired about being gallery manager. “I thought it would be more appropriate for a studio artist to be the person who hangs the work, but the curator of collections thought I should look at the position of registrar instead,” he recalls. “My response was, ‘Okay…what is that?’”

As it turns out, it’s a lot. Comba’s official job description is to track everything about every object in the museum, whether it belongs to the PCMA collection or is on loan from another institution. If someone needs to know where an object is and how it’s doing, Comba is the person to call. He also oversees conservation efforts of pieces that have seen better days. “I get a lot of personal gratification when I’ve done something for an object that I know will further its preservation,” he says.

But for Comba, being the museum’s registrar is more than just cataloguing. When his daughter was a student at Sycamore Elementary, he enjoyed being able to supplement her class’s lessons about native peoples by bringing in real Cherokee sandals. Now he is one of the main coordinators of the museum’s two-year-old outreach program to local third grade classes. In the College-sponsored program, students take a field trip to the museum to see in person the artifacts they studied in the classroom. Comba advocates a hands-on approach, sometimes even letting students wear gloves and pass around a 130-year-old Cherokee lacrosse ball. He works hard to structure his lessons so that students have an opportunity to see the continuity of culture.

Comba is also an active figure in the museum’s internship program. He has been in the museum business so long—July marked his 28th year with PCMA—that several influential figures behind the doors of larger institutions, such as the registrar of Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum, were his students. However, the most rewarding part of the job for Comba is still his intimate connection to the art. “At a certain point, you can say it’s no longer a choice,” he explains. “The need becomes ingrained in the DNA. Whenever we travel on vacation and we’re anywhere within reasonable distance of a museum, my family knows that I’m going to start to sweat if I don’t get to go in there and see it. I was asked how I get ideas for my paintings and it’s the same thing. I no longer have to look for them, because every time I look out I see the world through a painting.”

As for the future of PCMA, Comba says that talk of a new, larger museum is in the works. With a collection that grows by 100 to 170 objects a year, adding more space only makes sense. “A museum isn’t just about the contents,” he explains. “It’s a place. The place either enhances or detracts from the experience of the visitor. What’s exciting about the future is that our desire to expand is not just about making the museum bigger. It’s about having that relationship be fundamentally better. It’s an exciting thing to be a part of.”

And yet, playing such a vital role in running a college museum was never what Comba initially imagined he would end up doing. “I lucked into it. It wasn’t a plan, but this gig with the museum is working out,” he says, laughing. “If you asked, I’d say I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.”

Girl Scout cookies are an emblem of childhood, a reminder of one of the few knocks on the door by a youngster on a fundraising mission that is almost universally welcomed. Samoas, Peanut Butter Patties, Trefoils. (Is your mouth watering yet?)

Not one of them has passed Vorva’s lips since 6th grade. Once an eager Brownie scout who earned a badge for selling more than 50 boxes, the Pomona College freshman cringes at the sight of those cookies after a Girl Scouts project on environmental consciousness she undertook in middle school grew into a national campaign against the use of unsustainably farmed palm oil and caught the interest of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time magazine and ABC News, among a host of others.

The hook, almost predictably, was that after launching a community awareness project detailing how palm oil can contribute to deforestation, destruction of orangutans’ habitat, global warming and human rights abuses, Vorva and partner Rhiannon Tomtishen, a former classmate who will attend Stanford next year, discovered they had been peddling the stuff door-to-door.

In 2007, they stopped selling cookies. “I had learned about palm oil plantations where orangutans were considered pests. They were set on fire and killed. I was outraged,” says Vorva, who was inspired by the work of chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall. “I started looking for the ingredient everywhere.

“Then Girl Scout cookie season rolled around and I turned over the box and there was palm oil. I was like, are you kidding me? Part of the Girls Scouts’ mission statement is to make the world a better place and use resources wisely. That’s been ingrained in me since first grade.”

AS THE GIRLS BECAME TEENAGERS, they became the Girl Scouts who were thorns in the side of the Girl Scouts of America, pressuring the organization to use only sustainably farmed palm oil in the nearly 200 million boxes of cookies its members sell each year. This led Vorva to speaking engagements around the country and a trip to Colombia, a country that produce palm oil alongside leading producers Malaysia and Indonesia.

The young women stood in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., holding a sign to try to draw the attention of First Lady Michelle Obama. They went to the Girl Scouts of America corporate office in New York in 2011, expecting a meeting with then-CEO Kathy Cloninger. Instead, Vorva says, they got a “photo op,” meetings with merchandise executives and badges for meeting the CEO and visiting the national headquarters.

In 2011, their lobbying finally led to a new Girl Scouts policy that Vorva and Tomtishen consider only a partial success: Since 2012, Girl Scout cookie boxes have carried the GreenPalm logo, indicating that their bakers participate in a certificate-trading program meant to offset use of unsustainable palm oil by offering a premium to palm oil producers who grow their crops under guidelines from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.

What the policy does not guarantee is that the palm oil actually in the cookies was sustainably farmed or is “rainforest safe,”—Vorva’s goal since determining it was unlikely snack-food makers would eliminate palm oil, a widely used ingredient in packaged foods that the Girls Scouts organization says their bakers tell them is necessary to ensure shelf life and serve as an alternative to trans fats.

“When I was 11 years old, it was, ‘I’m going to take palm oil out of Girl Scout cookies, and then I’m going to take it out of Twix, and then I’m going to take it out of shampoo, and I’m going to take it out of everything.’ But as I’ve grown up, that’s not realistic,” Vorva says.

The Girls Scouts organization also has pledged to urge its licensed bakers to move to segregated, certified sources of sustainable palm oil by 2015, “based on market availability.” Vorva says the policy needs to be stronger.

“They decided to come up with a policy that looked really good on cardboard—on cardboard boxes—and hope it would go away,” she says. “It’s better than nothing, but it’s not deforestation- free. It’s not traceable and there are not a lot of human rights protections in the guidelines.”

Amanda Hamaker, director of Girl Scout Merchandise Strategic Initiatives, declined to comment for this article. When the policy was announced in 2011, Hamaker said that “Girl Scouts’ palm oil use is very small, but our voice is big” and called Vorva and Tomtishen “shining examples of leadership in persuading a 99-year-old American icon to take on a serious global issue.”

An empty cookie box isn’t the only souvenir Vorva, known as “Madi,” has of her campaign. Far more impressive is the heavy medal on a green ribbon. It is a United Nations award she, along with Tomtishen, won as a 2011 U.N. Forest Hero after being nominated by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The students, then 16 years old, were two of only six winners worldwide and the only ones from North America.

Not a bad thing to have on your college application.

SITTING IN A LECTURE ROOM in Edmunds Hall, a LEED gold-certified building that opened in 2007, Vorva blends in easily, a fresh-faced 18-year-old with cascades of strawberry blonde curls wearing a sleeveless dress to fend off the September heat. She looks much like any other freshman taking Introduction to Environmental Analysis, but her reputation precedes her.

Professor Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor and director of the Environmental Analysis Program, recalls meeting Vorva on her admissions visit. “Within about a minute and a half, I was recruiting her as hard as I could,” says Miller, praising Vorva and what he called her “sophisticated” campaign. “She’s 18 going on maybe 36. She’s so mature and has had such an imaginative response to the orangutan issue and more generally to environmental issues. It’s really mind-blowing.”

Vorva, who grew up in Plymouth, Mich., the daughter of Jerry Vorva, a former Michigan state legislator, and Joan Crimmins, a financial analyst, also considered attending the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she went to Greenhills School, a private high school whose flexibility she credits with helping her continue her work on the palm oil issue. “If I had gone to public school with my absences, I’d never have been able to graduate,” she says.

Her accomplishments earned her less interest from Ivy League schools than one might expect—Vorva says she couldn’t afford to take a test-preparation class and didn’t do as well on the SAT as she might have hoped—but she learned about Pomona when she used the college search tool on the website of the College Board, administrator of the SAT. “Pomona was the only one that came up. And I was like, oh, that’s kind of terrifying,” Vorva says. “So I’d never even heard the name before and it introduced me to this small liberal arts school.”

Two visits later, Vorva moved into her dorm in August. Already, she is wrestling to keep her activism going alongside the increased demands of college. Vorva missed a week of class in September to appear at the Great Apes Summit at the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival in Wyoming, once again meeting her mentor, Goodall. (She says one of her goals is to have Goodall visit campus during the next four years.)

In addition to her travel, Vorva estimates she often spends one to two hours a day on the project, working online and participating in several conference calls a week with Tomtishen or nonprofit partners that have included the Rainforest Action Network.

Concerned about missing more time in class because of travel than a professor would allow, Vorva contacted Professor Eleanor P. Brown, James Irvine Professor of Economics and chair of the

Economics Department.“I told her, ‘I don’t know what to do about a fourth class and I’m worried,’” Vorva says. “She says, ‘Oh, take intro Microeconomics and I’ll help you out once you come back if you have any questions.’ And this is the head of the Economics Department who I probably wouldn’t be meeting at another school, unless I was an econ major. I was so relieved to find that support, coming here. And that’s why I’m here.”

ALREADY SKILLED AT PUBLIC SPEAKING as well as working with nonprofits and utilizing social media, Vorva anticipates a major in environmental analysis, public policy or international relations and later attending graduate school, perhaps in business.

Vorva says she would like to write about environmental issues and continue to try to inspire other activists. But in what might be a surprise to some, she hopes to work for a big corporation someday.

In August, she and Tomtishen visited the Kellogg Co. in Battle Creek, Mich., to deliver a petition with more than 100,000 signatures on the palm oil issue gathered by a consumer organization called SumOfUs. Vorva would like to return someday as an employee. “My message has been to show consumers that their everyday purchases are having these global impacts. So if I can work for a company like Kellogg’s and decide where their raw materials are coming from, I’d love to do that. “Everyone says I’d be selling my soul, that you’re a bad guy for doing that, or ‘Why would you go to the dark side?’

“I’ve worked with a lot of nonprofits. There’s only so much they can do …. If I can be someone who makes decisions, I can work from within to change policies, change the sources.” As she prepares to “graduate” from Girl Scouts, Vorva, a registered lifetime member, completed a final project from her dorm room to earn her Girl Scout Gold Award—the equivalent of Eagle Scout—by building a sophisticated website, www.changestartswithapassion.org, to give young people resources for starting their own projects.

“So it’s like, how do you identify your passion? Or how do you take a campaign from your local community to something national?” she says.

Life as an activist isn’t always easy. A box of Cheez-Its stands on a shelf in her dorm room. “These have palm oil,” she says with a hint of resignation. “I eat them and I shouldn’t.” Glancing at the old Thin Mints box again, she sighs. “I’d still love to eat a Girl Scout cookie if I could.”