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.

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.