by Mallary Jean Tenore ’07

As a high school sophomore, Elizabeth Serio ’07 of Littleton, Mass., began raising money for a cause that has become central to her life.

To help in the fight against cancer, then-16-year-old Serio collected dozens of yogurt container lids through Yoplait’s “Save Lids to Save Lives” fundraising program for breast cancer research. Since then, she has also walked the 60-mile Avon Walk for Breast Cancer in Boston and has become a founder and current vice president of PC’s chapter of Colleges Against Cancer, a group supported by the American Cancer Society.

Most notably, last spring, in recognition of her leadership skills and commitment, the American Cancer Society selected Serio as the national training chairperson for the 2005-06 National Colleges Against Cancer Volunteer Leadership Team.

“It’s very energizing and refreshing to be around the people I work with,” said Serio, who has traveled throughout the country this academic year to meet with student leaders of about 170 Colleges Against Cancer chapters. “I think that with a lot of people my age it’s common to say, ‘I don’t care about this or that,’ but Colleges Against Cancer is one group that people think it is cool to care about.”

As national training chair, Serio organizes leadership and team-building activities aimed at developing new chapters and improving existing chapters. Most recently, she attended a conference in Los Angeles , Calif., where she created a training manual and helped assemble a welcome kit for college students interested in starting chapters.

Helping in the fight against cancer has become a way of life for Serio, who believes strongly in the hope for a cure. Her grandfather and two aunts are cancer survivors, she said, and many of her friends’ parents have survived the disease, further prompting her to want to help raise funds to fight the disease.

She was inspired to help create PC’s Colleges Against Cancer chapter in spring 2004 after taking part in PC’s annual Relay for Life event, which last year raised more than $51,000 for cancer research. As captain of the “Think Pink” relay team, Serio initiated several fundraisers, including a campuswide T-shirt sale.

Serio, who has designed her own leadership studies major, is also an admission ambassador, a member of PC’s Dirigo student leader honor society, and a community assistant at Sophia Academy , a school for low-income middle school girls in Providence .

After graduation, she hopes to work for the American Cancer Society to continue raising awareness about the disease. Wherever life takes her, Serio said, the lessons she has learned at PC will serve as her guiding force.

“I’ve had a lot of inspirational faculty and some very interactive classes with real-world applications,” she said. Last spring, for instance, Serio took an organizational behavioral class taught by Michelle Jones, assistant professor of management, in which she learned how to decode various personality types. The class helped Serio to better understand what motivates people to act, and it taught her how to more effectively lead people with conflicting personality traits, she said.

“I’ve been able to bring together all these experiences and replicate them in a more professional setting,” she said. “With all of my work [at PC] I can directly see the correlation to the real world.”