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What happens when a student spends her first three years on the hilltop taking risks? Get to know Jovahana Avila ’19, and you’ll see how seizing opportunities can bring out your best.

Avila set a goal for her freshman year: to land an internship at the Texas State Capitol.That summer, she joined the office of State Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, D-Austin, as a legislative intern. The experience confirmed her choice to pursue a Political Science and Writing and Rhetoric double major. She saw it as a way to connect people to opportunities, a struggle Avila related to as a first-generation Mexican-American student at ����������Ƶ.

“Political science helps me understand the world around me, how it works and how to use my role to help others,” says Avila, who returned to Rodriguez’s office last spring as a legislative aide. “Education is both my key and my tool for breaking the cycle and moving my family forward.”

Learning about the impact political science can have gave Avila an “edge-of-my-seat feeling,” she says, and she’s continued to feel that way in her classes and internships with local political nonprofits and the Environmental Protection Agency, where she worked last summer. “I’m passionate about working with first-generation students, advocacy work and voter turnout among minority populations,” Avila says. “Everything I’m involved in now has strengthened my values and kept me grounded, and I’m hoping to transfer that into a career.”

Avila is an Honors student and a resident assistant in the Honors Living Learning Community in Jacques Dujarié Hall. She’s also the president of the Latino Student Leaders Organization; writes for the student newspaper, Hilltop Views; is a supervisor in Meadows Coffeehouse on campus; interns with the League of Women Voters of Texas; tutors local students as a volunteer at Con Mi Hermana, a sister program under the education nonprofit Con Mi MADRE; and has participated in three Campus Ministry service trips.

Photography by Whitney Devin ’10