At age 16, Carmina Mancenon found herself presenting to a room of 100 world leaders, including heads of state, at the 2010 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It was a heady experience.

She was pitching her idea for an international nonprofit to reduce poverty and build bridges between privileged and underprivileged youth. “We had five minutes to present an idea with a few slides that changed every 20 seconds,” she says. “My idea was Stitch Tomorrow.”
 

With a friend in Australia, Mancenon decided that Stitch Tomorrow could help underprivileged teenagers establish themselves in the fashion business as designers, manager and models, while servicing the fashion desires of privileged youth.
 

“Stitch Tomorrow will provide teens with resources, capital and education to help them create their own eco-friendly fashion lines with clothing materials made out of recycled materials,” she explained to the receptive audience. The pitch worked so well that Mancenon and her partner now have some very high-profile backers in the Philippines and other parts of the globe.
 

Stitch Tomorrow drew directly from Mancenon’s own experience and interests. She spent three years in Manila for primary school and later moved to Tokyo, where she attended high school (she speaks idiomatic English, as well as Japanese and Tagalog, the Philippine dialect). In Tokyo, she could shop in some of the city’s trendy fashion districts; in Manila, she had the painful experience of sitting in an air conditioned car observing poor children sift through waste dumps for clothing and other essentials. Through a network called Global Changemakers, an organization with the mission of empowering youth to catalyze positive social change, Mancenon was able to present her idea to the World Economic Forum.
 

At Princeton, Mancenon is continuing to build on her interests in social entrepreneurship, academic research and policy involving developing countries. She expects to major in either operations research and financial engineering or the Woodrow Wilson School. “ORFE provides me with the data handling and programming skills to manage the technical side of policy making and entrepreneurship,” she says “If I were to pursue the Woodrow Wilson concentration, then I would definitely still take a certificate in ORFE.” She also hopes to take courses in urban studies and the arts to round out her learning.
 

Mancenon visited universities in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and the Philippines, but was drawn to Princeton because of its strong school spirit and explicit focus on civic engagement. She is on the Pace Council for Civic Values, a student board at the Pace Center that seeks to promote a culture of active citizenship at Princeton. She is social chair of the International Students Association, and is active in the Social Entrepreneurship Initiative, which stages events with high profile figures to focus students on the possibilities of innovation and social change.
 

Mancenon believes that Princeton is unique in the learning it provides to students outside the University’s gates. During spring break in her freshman year, she traveled to San Francisco with other students to learn about high-impact philanthropy through a Pace Center Breakout Trip. In the summer following her freshman year, she worked in two Princeton-organized internships: one at a rural healthcare project in Zithulele Village, South Africa, through a PEI/Grand Challenges internship, and another at a Chicago startup company as a systems analyst through the Entrepreneurial Internship Program of the Keller Center.
 

She loves the fact that at Princeton she can take introductory courses with professors who are world-renowned in their fields. As an example, she cites her Economics 101 course taught by Alan Binder, who was vice chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and the author of the textbook the class used. “Just the fact that these leaders are willing to teach freshmen gives us a lot of motivation,” she says.