GUILDERLAND — Two Guilderland High School students, Elca Hubbard and Angelica Sofia Parker, will soon be competing against each other in the Miss Teen New York pageant — and yet they are supporting one another as friends.

The state pageant, which feeds into the Miss Teen USA pageant, says on its website, “Some of Hollywood’s most successful talent including Halle Berry, Eva Longoria, Giuliana Rancic, Vanessa Minnillio, Maria Menounos, Ali Landry, Shelley Hennig and Olivia Culpo got their start competing in the Miss USA pageant.”

And yet neither Elca nor Angelica wants to be a movie star.

Elca, since she was young, she says at age 18, has always loved studying history and wants to be a lawyer.

“History is so important to me because, if we can’t learn from history we’re bound to repeat it,” she said. She hopes to practice in corporate law.

“I feel like law is so important in society,” Elca said, “and, ever since I was little, I’ve always loved sharing my opinions … I think being a lawyer would be the perfect job for me.”

Since Angelica was a child, she has wanted to become a doctor, she said. “I’m a high honor student and I kind of just enjoy learning about new things,” said Angelica. “But my favorite topics have always been health and to do with the arts as well.”

Two years ago, Angelica said, she decided she would like to be a plastic surgeon. She’d like to do surgeries to help children with cleft palates. “That could help kids with their confidence and their speech … and it can impact their ability to breathe,” she said.

Neither girl has been in a pageant before.

“When I started the New Year, I made a decision that I was going to try and go outside my comfort zone and try new things,” said Elca. She saw a notice for the pageant on Instagram and decided to apply.

“I’m one of the youngest contestants because I’m only 14 …,” said Angelica. “I decided that I wanted to compete because I see winning as an opportunity to have a platform to speak out on important issues, especially impacting students.”

Angelica has spoken out before, in a letter to the Enterprise editor this year. As an athlete on her school’s track team, she and her female teammates were not allowed to wear just sports bras, even in warm weather. Angelica called for a fair and sensible policy.

Her platform for the pageant will be calling for “common-sense laws that limit the sale of automatic and semi-automatic guns” and “stopping vaping companies from marketing to young people.”

She explained, “The means to the end is to show people how damaging vaping can be.” Right now, she said, since vaping is “something that everyone does,” they think it can’t be harmful. “But vaping hasn’t been out long enough for us to know the severe damage it does,” said Angelica.

Elca will speak out against bullying. When she was young, she was called “the teacher’s pet,” she said. “I answer a lot of questions and it led to kids being mean to me. And the way I combatted that is that I decided no matter what they were going to say, I was going to continue to be myself,” said Elca.

“I wasn’t going to let anyone else crush my confidence,” she said. “I was going to push forward and be myself.”

Asked why they chose a pageant for a platform rather than, say, running for office, or lobbying, or even writing more letters to the editor, Elca said pageants are “a great way to show that both beauty — which is very subjective — and smarts can all come together … It’s just such a different way to do things than, for example, running for something.”

Angelica agreed. “Beauty pageants can sometimes objectify women and I thought of it as an opportunity to show that it’s not only on the outside that you can show yourself, on the inside too and show you’re smart and just show everything about you instead of just on the outside.”

Elca and Angelica have signed up to be roommates for the competition, which will be held in Westchester County from  Aug. 4 to 6. The pageant will use the performing arts center stage at Purchase College where the contestants will model activewear, answer interview questions from a panel of judges, perform a dance together, and model an evening gown.

Both of the Guilderland competitors said their families have been supportive of all they do, including the pageant. Elca’s name comes from the first two letters of each of her grandmothers’ names and Angelica’s is a name from her mother’s family.

“I’m going into this hoping that I have a fighting chance to win,” said Angelica, “because it would be a really good platform for me to talk about issues but, if I don’t win, that’s still OK … It’s a learning experience for me.”

“I would love to win, just like Sofia,” said Elca, “and I do think it would also be good for my platform, but I am really just happy to be able to be in a pageant like this … It’s both of our first times and honestly just being able to experience something like that, I’m so grateful for it.”