By: Nicole Cattin

My family and I spent my mom’s 52nd birthday decorating my dorm room in Buckingham Hall. My mom’s only birthday wish that year, in 2016, was that I would have a successful first year of my college career. 

A few days prior, we had filled the largest duffel bags that Southwest Airlines would allow with the contents of my teenage bedroom and flew across the country. I went to a huge high school with two separate campuses, in two separate towns in the suburbs of Chicago and graduated with more than 1,000 students. Because I attended such a large high school, I knew I wanted a bigger university and hoped to find my home at CU Boulder through doing extracurriculars, similar to what I had done in high school. 

The Stampede Leadership Camp, a program that allows incoming first year students to participate in and volunteer for on-campus activities, was my first attempt at finding this home. As a participant, I arrived on campus a week earlier than most. Through Stampede, I became involved in the Residence Hall Association (RHA) and Buckingham Hall Council— two more attempts to find a home on-campus.

I managed to find a group of friends like I had hoped for, but they lived outside of my dorm. Not that there is any problem with that, but I had just dreamed of that typical college experience where you are best friends with everyone on your floor and you do everything with your roommate. However, after the first two weeks of college, I began experiencing some difficulties with my roommate, and I felt like my dreams of having the perfect college experience had been crushed.

I ended up changing rooms and had to make a new space feel like home, this time without the help of my parents or the birthday celebration. I packed up the life I had created during those first few weeks of college and moved across the building into a new room and with a new roommate. Even the bathroom was an adjustment, because now I was sharing it with three girls (my roommate and two suitemates) instead of the whole floor; strange as it seems, the community bathroom was where a great deal of bonding occurred.

When I finally settled in, I tried to foster that dream relationship with my roommate and suitemates; but with different interests, sororities and sports, I had to admit to myself that this wasn’t going to be the perfect experience either. And that’s when it set in. I began to regret the celebration of my mom’s birthday in my dorm room, simply because I wasn’t holding up my end of the birthday wish.

For a month straight, I watched college admissions videos from other universities like it was a Netflix series. My dad begged me to wait it out, reassuring me that life was never going to be perfect like those movies we have all seen. He reminded me of all the fun that we had in Colorado together; all of the laughs that we had when we took a snow biking lesson; all of the hours we spent in ski traffic just so we could get a single powder day in each season; and all of the resorts he still wanted to come ski with me.

I promised him I would attempt to find my home with a group of students who loved the mountains as much as I did. When that first ski season came around, I was on every CU Ski Bus— twice a weekend, every weekend. Sometimes I went with friends, but most times I went without. I started recognizing others on the bus. I never got their names, but I could spot their jacket-and-pants combination from a mile away. I knew from that first bus ride that I had found my people. I continued to ride the CU Ski Bus until the end of the season, and then I would take anyone up on a ride to Arapahoe Basin just so I could ski some more. Despite the lack of names to show for finding my home, I knew that CU had a spot for me and that if I continued to spend time doing what I loved, that home would grow.

If I had continued to watch my freshman year version of Netflix, I would have never had the opportunity to later intern at Warren Miller Entertainment, a ski film production company during their 2019 tour of “Timeless.” I would have never met the fantastic faculty members that knew my love for the outdoors and helped me apply it to any project possible. I would have never met the guys behind RovR Products, a local high-end cooler company, where I interned and designed a hang tag for their latest product that is now in a number of REI stores across the country; nor would I have gotten my first full-time job with them after graduating from CU Boulder in 2020.

While there are plenty of “what-ifs” regarding what my life would have looked like if I had stayed in the Midwest, those faded from my mind when I found my home; if someone were to create a movie regarding my dream life, it would look pretty similar to exactly this.