A few weeks after she decided to campaign for Claremont McKenna College’s first-year class president, Zoey Marzo CM ’29 was crafting a vision board one night, cutting out words like ‘success’ and ‘happiness,’ when the call came.
“I genuinely think I manifested it,” Marzo said. “As I was putting [these words] on the paper, I got a call from the elections officer. She’s like, ‘Hi Zoey, you won. Do you accept this position?’ And I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, yes.’”
Sitting in a circle surrounded by her friends, magazine clippings and glue sticks, Marzo described how the chaos of the moment is precisely what made it so memorable.
“I was just in so much shock,” she said. “But I truly felt the depth of having this community behind me.”
When Marzo first mentioned she was thinking of running, her new friends didn’t hesitate to support her. They helped craft social media posts, spread the word to their classmates and effectively turned her campaign into a collective effort rather than a solo one.
“It was super rewarding to see that these people who had basically just met me were so accepting of me to be representative of the whole first-year class,” she said.
For Sora Sohn CM ’29, the first-year committee’s wellness and community builder, it felt natural to support Marzo’s candidacy.
“My first impression of Zoey was that she was fierce and capable of leadership,” Sohn said. “She’s strategic, well-spoken and has a strong sense of humor to top it all off.”
Marzo attributed much of her successful campaign to her friends and peers. She has decided to prioritize community support and connectivity in her first major event as class president: the First-Year Frat, a CMC first-year class party.
“Everyone was talking to people they never would have, and being able to help build that, along with my cabinet and all the other people that helped, was just really fulfilling,” Marzo said.
Sohn isn’t the only person who’s thrown their enthusiastic support behind Marzo –– everyone on CMC’s campus has at least one Marzo story.
Maybe she stopped you outside The Hub to ask about your economics midterm. Perhaps she pulled you into a conversation at Collins Dining Hall over lunch, or waved from across Flamson Plaza, calling your name before you even noticed her.
“I have to work time into my schedule for like an extra 10 minutes of my walk to class,” Marzo said. “Knowing that I’m going to bump into someone that I can’t stop talking to.”
Marzo moves through campus like she’s tuned to its frequency. Mirroring the quick, conversational energy of the people she represents, she’s never still, always orbiting others. It’s that same pulse that pulled her to CMC in the first place; she chose this campus because it matched her own rhythm of constant motion and connection.
“Zoey represents the personality of the CMC Class of 2029 through her drive, her goals and her ability to bring people together,” Sohn said. “She feels like a leader who can touch ground on all topics and interests.”
To address the ideas and concerns of each one of her classmates, one of Marzo’s priorities was to assemble her own first-year committee. With every new first-year representative, a new committee is formed. It is, however, up to the current president to envision the individual roles and recruit members.
Instead of initially assigning students to specific tasks, Marzo deliberately chose to let each member of her cabinet exercise agency and creativity in shaping their team’s mission.
“The leader [of the committee] can have that initial step,” she said, “but they have to have all these other people backing them, helping and supporting and bringing in new ideas.”
This perspective also extends to the first-year president’s view of how collaboration takes place within her team.
“At the end of the day, the best way to communicate with people is in person,” she said. “We meet every week and I hear ideas and concerns that never would have occurred to me, but that our general class is coming up with.”
Marzo’s continuous efforts to include the perspective of every member of her class have deeply resonated with many of her peers, including Charlotte Shamia CM ’29.
“She’s always open to people’s ideas and asking for feedback,” Shamia said. “You can tell she really cares about representing everyone’s ideas, not just her own. I love that her cabinet includes so many different people; it shows how much she values collaboration.”
Marzo insists that it’s really the first-year class at CMC that harnesses this vibrant energy.
“We’re excited for everything,” Marzo said. “Academics, sports, socially and emotionally. We’re hungry for all of it.”
Her job, as she sees it, is to keep that energy alive. To turn the hunger for belonging into a true sentiment of home at CMC.
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