Entering college alone can be a challenge, especially for students who haven’t found their niche or whose friends have scattered to different schools. What is supposed to be an exciting new chapter can quickly become isolating.
Across the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), women aren’t just searching for community, they’re building it. They are creating organizations that fill personal and professional gaps they once experienced themselves, from volunteer spaces rooted in healing to professional societies reshaping creative industries.
Turning grief into service: The Women’s Volunteer Organization
When Karmen Corona, a junior at UTEP, arrived in her first semester, many of her closest friends had left the state. Rather than sitting with the loneliness, she decided to follow an old dream and create the kind of space she wished had existed for her.
“I feel like I created something that I wish I could have joined when I first came in and had no friends,” Corona said.
Corona founded the Women’s Volunteer Organization (WVO) with community at its heart. She believes that many women genuinely want to be involved in their communities but may not know where to start, something her group works to remedy. The organization hosts several events each semester, ranging from pilates classes to food bank volunteering and fundraising efforts.
“I think women are so badass. Honestly, I just love women,” Corona said. “I think women are capable of so many things… I feel like women don’t realize how much they can do, more than anything.”
In collaboration with Celsius, the student-led Women’s Volunteer hosted a recreational community activity “Pilates for Puppies,” El Paso, Texas, Feb. 28, 2026.
For Corona, the group represents more than community service as she also built the organization to honor her late grandfather.
“My father figure was basically my grandpa and his way of living life, honestly, it taught me a lot,’ Corona said. “He led life with a lot of kindness. So that’s definitely something that has given me a lot of peace. Now we have a bunch of girls living by his way of life.”
By channeling her grief into something transformative, Corona hopes the community she built will be as fulfilling and healing for other women as it has been for her.
“I feel like when I founded the organization, I was actually very depressed,” Corona said. “And I feel like I grabbed all of that and turned into something beautiful, and by helping people, it healed something in me.”
What began as a personal journey quickly grew into something bigger than herself. Through the organization, Corona began to see not just her own strength, but the power that emerges when women are given the space to lead.
“We only live once. Don’t waste your time being shy or overthinking things. Just do it,” Corona said.
For Corona, the WVO is proof of that potential, a space where women turn hardship into action and action into impact.
Redefining creative marketing: The Media Marketing Society
While Corona’s organization grew from personal healing, the founders of the Media Marketing Society (MMS) were motivated by professional frustration.
Ivanna Rico, Aylin Montanez, Estefania La Torre and Fernanda Montes found themselves drawn to the creative side of marketing. Something they felt was underrepresented within UTEP’s Woody L. Hunt College of Business.
Although the university already had a chapter of the American Marketing Association, Montanez said it focused more on the analytical and corporate fields of the industry, leaving little room for creative-minded students.
“We realized it didn’t meet the needs of what we wanted to focus on for our marketing career,” Montanez said. “We realized there’s more marketing on the creative side than just maybe photography and videography. We wanted to fill that gap.”
From that gap, Montanez and her co-founders were inspired to carve out a space for themselves and other students interested in creative marketing. They built the MMS to provide members with hands-on professional experience for their future careers.
“Our main goal as an organization is that we want to provide members with professional experiences. We focus a lot on that, and put professional experiences, development events are really niche, really cool and really special,” Montes, the MMS president, said.
The Media Marketing Society is a woman-led organization within the Woody L. Hunt College of Business designed to help students in the dynamic fields of media and marketing through networking opportunities and hands-on experiences, El Paso, Texas, on March 3, 2026.
Starting with just four founders and a handful of friends, the organization initially struggled to attract committed members.
“The progress we’ve made in our two years has been what’s kept us going,” Montanez said. “I remember people stopped going to meetings. We had like five members and at the end it was just us going because it was important to us and we wanted to grow.”
Now their meetings are full, a testament not only to their growth but also to the presence of women in creative marketing, a field where their work is often undervalued despite their dominance.
“I do think women carry the marketing industry, and actually in our meetings most of them are women,” Montes said. “But it’s also really underpaid, underrecognized. Women are there, and I think they’re partly recognized, but not to the extent they should be.”
For Hernandez, one of the organization’s first members and its community service director, the group has been a space to build confidence, professional skills and connections.
“I feel much more confident. Meeting people in marketing has helped me a lot,” Hernandez said. “It was a fun environment, and that’s what made me want to go to the meetings. Before MMS, I felt like I was just there. I used to think of myself as, ‘okay, I can do this, but I’m not creative.’ MMS did this switch on my mind, and I knew I was capable of a lot.”
Hernandez’s experience shows how society not only works to fill a professional gap but also empowers its members to develop their skills and leadership beyond the classroom.
As organizations like WVO and the MMS continue to grow, they reflect a broader shift happening across campus, where students are no longer waiting for opportunities or spaces to appear, but are creating them on their own terms.
For the women behind these groups, what started as responses to loneliness, grief or professional gaps has evolved into lasting communities that support, empower and uplift others.
In building the spaces they once needed, they are ensuring that future students won’t have to search as hard to find where they belong.
Jewel Ocampo is a staff reporter and may be reached at [email protected]