I attended CMC in the 80’s. I am so grateful for the opportunities this education provided for my family and me.

Olive Morton, Bud Romberg and Dan Schaffrick are the people I remember most. Olive was always so encouraging as I pursued my education while waitressing and becoming a new mom.

Bud Romberg was my organic and inorganic chemistry teacher. I initially had taken chemistry at CU Boulder along with over 300 other students in Chem 140. One did not ask questions in this large of a class. At CMC, there were six people in my chemistry classes. Mr. Romberg was patient and could tell if someone needed additional help. I was able to obtain all my pre-requisites at CMC to apply to nursing school at CU.

Dan Schaffrick encouraged and showed me how a college education might be attainable through financial aid. I had thought I could never afford college with three young children at home. He not only showed me how this was possible, but also helped my ex-husband obtain financial aid for CMC.

We both transferred after CMC, I obtained my BSN in Nursing in 1989 from CU and then my master’s in Nurse Midwifery in 1995. I’ve worked in Denver as a Nurse Midwife for more than 20 years both in private practice and was employed by Swedish Medical Center from 2000-2016. I currently am employed by Saint Joseph Hospital in Denver with the Midwifery Group.

My ex-husband attended CSU and graduated with his BS in construction management in 1990 and then his master’s in construction management in 1992. He currently works for a home builder in North Carolina. In 2010, he helped with the reconstruction of transitional shelters in Haiti for Catholic Relief Services and remained in Haiti sporadically through 2015.

I am so grateful for the excellent start to my career CMC afforded me. I have always loved my chosen career path and know I would not have been able to attain this without the personal encouragement, smaller classes and education I received at CMC.

Looking for direction, Noelle Brigden found it at Colorado Mountain College.

Noelle was recently out of the army and recovering from a severe back injury. She hadn’t done well in high school but received a California Proficiency Exam Diploma, so she decided to give college a try with her veteran’s benefits.

“CMC helped me find my way by giving me confidence,” explains Noelle, who went on from Colorado Mountain College Steamboat to earn a Ph.D. from Cornell, Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown University and a Fulbright Award.

Noelle says that CMC helped her “find direction through the advising and support of professors that encouraged me to reach for higher goals.”

But more importantly, the California native stresses, CMC helped make learning fun again. She describes CMC as a supportive environment where “I was never turned away from a professor’s office.”

“And the fact that the professors were so enthusiastic really inspired me,” she says.

Noelle now brings that same type of enthusiasm to the students in her classroom at Marquette University.

“It was the right decision for me,” Noelle says of attending CMC. “And I would encourage others to choose CMC, particularly for non-traditional students that might be a little apprehensive about returning to the classroom.”

Noelle adds that CMC provided an excellent foundation for future study by allowing her to take a wide range of courses like economics and Spanish. She even got to reflect on her time in the military during speech class.

“All of these things opened up a lot of different worlds to me that I wasn’t aware of,” she recalls.

That eagerness to learn new ideas continued throughout her academic career. Noelle’s doctoral research focused on the violence and uncertainty that confronts Central American migrants. She conducted two years of fieldwork at a Catholic migrant shelter, and rode a train along illegal migrant routes in El Salvador, Mexico and the United States.

Her research has led to countless journal articles and she is in the process of writing a book. Noelle was also recently awarded a highly competitive invitation to be Visiting Associate Research Scholar at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS).

“Where would I be without CMC? I don’t know,” says Noelle. All of this might not have been possible if she had not found Colorado Mountain College.

As a 19-year-old freestyle skier from Seattle, Washington, Joshua Loubek could not imagine a magical place where he could ski world-famous powder in the morning and attend college classes in the afternoon.

But that is exactly what he found when he enrolled at Colorado Mountain College in Steamboat Springs. It was an environment where he felt empowered to reach his full potential with support from professors like Diane Mitsch-Busch and Janie Peck.

“I’m grateful for my experience at CMC, I was 100% in the right spot,” says Loubek.

He first learned of the school in 1993, while competing at the Junior National Championships in the then-nascent sport of freestyle skiing. He met Steamboat resident and U.S. Ski Team Coach Park Smalley, who noticed his potential. Fresh out of high school, Loubek was feeling torn between wanting to pursue his dream of skiing, and making his parents happy by attending college. When Smalley told him about a place where he could do both, he packed his bags for Steamboat Springs.

Loubek spent a year skiing and training before he enrolled in an Associate of Arts program. He shared a room at the Christie House, located at the base of the ski area, with two fellow skiers and two snowboarders.

“I remember getting up early to ski until noon, then catching the bus straight to campus,” recalls Loubek. “I literally would walk into the classroom still with my ski boots on and sit down for class.”

Loubek thrived in the mountain town, becoming a world-class freeskier/XGames competitor while earning his degree. After retiring from competition, he became a head judge for the XGames and other global competitions around the world. By this time, extreme snow sports had taken off and were slated for inclusion in the Olympic program.

But the governing body for skiing, the International Ski Federation (FIS), did not know how to quantify or score the new tricks. Loubek and three others founded the Association of Freeskiing Professionals and created a ranking and judging system which was adopted by the FIS and remains the gold standard used today.

As an expert in the freeskiing half-pipe, and slopestyle events, Loubek was selected as a judge at the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games. In addition to judging at other elite-level events, he worked as a television commentator for three years as well.

Loubek also played a part in launching the Armada ski brand in the early 2000’s. For all his work, he was recognized by ESPN in 2013  as one of the top 50 most influential people in action sports.

Now retired from judging, he is based in Boise, Idaho as a sales rep for Oakley. He fondly recalls his time on the Alpine Campus.

“CMC was the perfect place for me,” he says. “It was exactly the mountain culture environment that I loved. It was so cool to be in a small town where everyone got excited about ski season, where 90% of the people around you were interested in what you were doing.”

During my time at CMC, I often doubted myself and asked why I was going to school for “Sustainability.” I knew deep inside it was what I actually believed in and what I wanted to do, to leave the world a better place, but I never fully understood the impact one person could make in this seemingly twisted, careless world.

I was often beaten down by the doom-and-gloom aspect of sustainability. With so many problems facing our generation I constantly asked myself, how is this going to actually help? Then I remembered something I wrote in one of my papers, “Sustainability is thought process.”

I realized that even the well-trained have to constantly work to better their way of being. We have to better the environment around us, we have to better the thought processes of the people around us. We have to use any and all tools of the past and present we have acquired over the span of our existence. I was so focused on what to do with what I had learned in school, that I was bypassing many of the tools in my quiver from years past.

So, I took my 15 years of bicycle maintenance experience and applied it to a dream I had when I first started working on bikes in Wisconsin. I could combine my experience and passion, with my newfound knowledge of social enterprise, grant research and grant writing, and apply it to the social inequality of Boulder County.

In July 2016, I launched Chain Reaction Bicycle Service. My fiancé and I are empowering the underserved population of Boulder County, utilizing bicycles as a vehicle of change. Our flagship Earn-A-Bike program aims to teach young people, Hispanic youth in particular, bicycle maintenance skills. This would equip them with real-world, tangible skills, and empower them with the tools to become self-sufficient.

The students that really like it could apply at their local bike shop and have an opportunity to enter the work force. Just as I continued to work towards bettering myself, I now have the opportunity to help do the same for others.

I have held basic classes and have given away 20 refurbished bicycles. Our partners are Zeal Optics, Whole Foods and Boulder County. We have a full-service bike shop and five portable bike maintenance stations used to teach classes.

I firmly believe that if you have the courage to start, you can make it succeed. Keep growing, change paths, find new questions which will provide the answers to how we attack the new problems. Start doing what you want. It’ll pay off.

Read more about the Sustainability Studies bachelor’s degree.

Professional commercial and editorial outdoor photographer Sean Kerrick Sullivan fondly remembers the time he spent in Steamboat Springs more than a decade ago earning his associate degree from Colorado Mountain College.

Sean was still on campus when he sold his first photograph commercially. Big Agnes, at that time a local outdoor start up, bought his shot of a friend enjoying the outdoors. They paid him with some money and a tent and “something kind of clicked right then and there,” Sean says. “I always knew photography was my calling, and the support of Big Agnes was the final push I needed. A lot of times the hardest part of any journey is those first couple of steps.”

Sean graduated from CMC in 2006 and went on to earn a BFA in photography from the University of Utah where he won the student art show.

In the decade since leaving CMC, Sullivan has gone on to become an accomplished photographer in his field. His work has landed him an illustrious list of clients including Orvis, Snowboarder Magazine, Warren Miller Entertainment, ESPN, Volcom, Transworld Snowboarding, Ski Utah, and more.

Every circle ends where it starts, and in 2016 Sullivan returned to Steamboat Springs as the commencement speaker for CMC’s graduation. “Steamboat really feels like home, and coming back feels like I’ve never left,” he says. “CMC is a cornerstone in the foundation of a dream that I’m still building, and the inspiration I found in the campus and community that surrounds it will always be in my blood, no matter how far I travel.”

In 2002 I was a senior in high school and I thought I had life figured out. I was going to attend CU Boulder, get a degree in Business and then be on my way to a million dollar salary. Oh man, was I wrong. I got denied from CU Boulder, and then I turned to CMC in Steamboat. My parents wanted me to attend “a real college” — whatever that means!

Getting denied from CU Boulder was the best thing to ever happen to me, but it took me some time to realize it. At CMC Steamboat I became my own person, and it was the start of a life, where I made decisions for myself and stopped worrying about pleasing other people, or doing things because it was the “norm.” My experience at CMC has shaped who I am today. I value education, but I also learned that you have to be inspired to truly get the most out of your education. Going to college in the Rocky Mountains in a place as beautiful as Steamboat inspired me to take my education seriously so I can get what I want out of life. For me that is quality over quantity.

If I would have attended CU Boulder, who knows where I would be today, but I am fairly sure I would not be at my current job working in the Career Center at Pickens Technical College, helping students everyday. When something happens to them in their life, and they feel it may change their plans forever, I share my story with them, and I always say, “Everything happens for a reason.” After CMC I attended Montana State University and received a Bachelor’s in Business Administration, then I went on to University of Phoenix and received my Master’s Degree in Education.