Ethel ‘Ellie’ Hylton graduates with highest GPA in her Harvard College class

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A major change came, though, as Hylton faced recurring injuries from her track career.

“I actually left the track team because I had a lot of injuries,” she explained. “That was definitely difficult because I felt like I had failed. I came [into] college thinking that I would improve and run faster than in high school. [After track], I started to think about where I would go next.”

Hylton overcame her disappointment with sports by thinking about her many alternative options, and opted to serve others. “I overcame [my track difficulties] by thinking about a new team that I could get involved with in [a] collaborative activity,” she told theGrio. “For me, that ended up being tutoring students through an after school program to prepare them for college and the SAT test. I met a ton of other undergrads who were involved in the program. I also built bonds with the staff and students who were high-schoolers in Boston.

“This was a way for me to build a new team and a new set of goals for myself after coming off the track team,” Hylton said. “Looking back, I’m glad that I was on the track team. However, a hidden blessing of me getting injured was being able to try new things.”

Inspired to help close the achievement gap

Ultimately, Hylton would love to pursue a career that helps close the achievement gap, something her college volunteer work prepared her for, and which also became a growing interest for her during her undergraduate career. Hylton, for example, “wrote [her] senior thesis about a modern, current school desegregation program,” one means of leveling the educational outcomes between students from different backgrounds.

Hylton knows she wants to pursue policy making as a career in keeping with this goal — but she is flexible about the process of getting into the perfect positioning to do so. “I want to make a difference in policy, but as to where that will take me, I’m open to figuring that out,” she explained.

As Hylton matriculates to the next phase of life, she will have a valuable Harvard degree and four years of deep experiences to help her apply herself in the future. But, spoken like a true humanitarian, what she values most about the Harvard experience is the people she met there, everyone from grad students to professors.

“I’ve met so many people there that I hope to keep in touch with for life,” Hilton mused.

Advice for college students just starting out

She also has some great advice for people just entering college, who might be inspired by her story. “I would tell them to find something that they are passionate about academically. You don’t need to study in one subject just because it was the right thing to do, or [to] get a job,” Hylton told theGrio. “I came in thinking that I would be pre-med at Harvard, but I really didn’t’ enjoy it that much. I switched to sociology, because the classes engaged me and I was interested in them. It was finding that academic passion that enabled me to throw myself into my work because it didn’t feel like a drag. It felt like something that I was excited to be working on.”

Hylton’s parting words of collegiate wisdom?

“Don’t limit yourself based off of some vision that you set before you go into college.”

Lawrence Watkins is the founder of Great Black Speakers, Great Pro Speakers, and co-founder of Ujamaa Deals, a daily deal site that promotes black-owned businesses. He graduated in 2006 from The University of Louisville with a B.S. in electrical engineering and earned his MBA from Cornell University in 2010. You can follow him on Twitter @lawrencewatkins.