For 56 years Glamour’s Top 10 College Women competition has recognized 10 students from across the country for campus leadership, scholastic achievement, community involvement, and unique, inspiring goals. This year for the first time, a Reader’s Choice winner was also named; more than a half million votes were cast on glamour.com to select the recipient. The Top 10 and Reader’s Choice winner, Janice Guzon, are profiled in the May 2013 issue of Glamour, which hits newsstands on April 9. Here is a link to the full article on glamour.com: http://glmr.me/Z6aU3l

Glamour awarded a $20,000 grand prize to Noorjahan Akbar for her work supporting equal rights for Afghan girls, and each of the other winners also received a cash prize, a trip to New York City, introductions to top professionals in a variety of fields, national recognition in the magazine, and a gift bag from L’Oréal Paris. Additionally, Mora Neilson, Director of Public Relations at L’Oréal Paris presented its Beauty of Giving award to one of the 10 honorees, Katherine Bomkamp. The award, a $2,500 donation to the charity of the winner’s choice, was given by L’Oréal Paris to the woman who exemplifies the strongest charitable spirit.

Click here to view the Google Hangout “After Show” presented by L’Oréal Paris following the panel featuring Glamour Editor-in-Chief Cindi Leive, MSNBC’s Alex Wagner, and the L’Oréal Paris Beauty of Giving award winner Katherine Bomkamp: http://youtu.be/Nk56ZgY8cEY

 Glamour’s 2013 Top 10 College Women

• Grand Prize Winner: Noorjahan Akbar, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA:A Kabul native and leader in the Afghan gender-equality movement, Akbar led the first march against street harassment in Afghan history and helped open the country’s first all-female Internet café.
• Simone Bernstein, St. Bonaventure University, St. Bonaventure, NY: Bernstein has helped 14,000 young people around the country find nearby community-service opportunities through volunteennation.org, the website that she founded with her brother. Already accepted to medical school, she has made it one of her goals to fight maternal mortality.
• Katherine Bomkamp, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV: This entrepreneur and CEO of her own company developed the Pain Free Socket, a patented prosthetics insert specifically designed to alleviate phantom pain in amputees and inspired by injured soldiers.
• Cara Eckholm, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ: Eckholm has out-debated opponents from more than 30 countries, coached inner-city New Jersey high school students, and served as president of Princeton’s politics and debate society.
• Margaret Gilroy, United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD: A 4.0-GPA systems engineering major and the lone brigade training sergeant who oversees the training of more than 1,000 freshman, Gilroy also captains the women’s marathon team and is co-founder of her local Girls on the Run program.
• Otana Jakpor, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA: The Environmental Protection Agency and the White House have commended Jakpor, a decorated scientist and environmental justice advocate, for her personal testimonies at the California Air Resource Board as a means to fight for cleaner air.
• Julie Johnston, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA: The All-American captained the U-20 U.S. women’s national team to World Cup victory in Tokyo last September—and was called up to train with the U.S. women’s national team this year.
• Alice Lee, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA: This self-taught developer-designer-coder graduated in three years even though she took a semester off to work at Foursquare in New York and to shoot photos for a nonprofit in Ethiopia. Lee’s Web résumé, “Dear Instagram,” attracted major attention from top Silicon Valley executives, and she’s now the youngest product designer at Dropbox.
• Micah Schure, Emerson College, Boston, MA: This pop singer and songwriter has performed her original music across the country, including at a fund-raiser with Michelle Williams of Destiny’s Child.
• Grace Young, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA: Admitted to MIT at 17, Young now helps design and build marine robots; one recently mapped part of the underside of Antarctic sea ice.