What’s something about you that most people wouldn’t know if they were looking right at you?
Garrett Rose briefly considered the question and then wrote:
I get depressed a lot.
“I either didn’t know what to say or didn’t understand the question,” Garrett, now a senior at CU Boulder, recalls.
Sean Coetzee loved how media forensics—an emerging industry that uses technology to fight crime in the digital age—expanded the realm of what he did as a sound engineer. Yet in late 2013, one year away from completing his master’s at CU Denver in the Media Forensics program, Sean was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. He died only six weeks later at the age of 32.
“When I lost Sean I thought my life was over,” said his wife, Melissa Coetzee.
Nina Jean was a rancher’s daughter, who passed down the value of working hard and helping others. She was the kind of grandmother who let you pick out whatever sugary cereal you wanted in the grocery store and who baked an extra pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving so you could eat it for breakfast the next morning.
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Tiffany Sinclair’s journey took some unexpected turns.
She endured the sudden death of her husband from toxic shock syndrome, the diagnosis of her 11-year-old daughter with brain cancer, then the death of her mother from liver cancer.
So when Tiffany was notified several years back that the University of Colorado Colorado Springs had accepted her as a Karen Possehl Women’s Endowment (KPWE) scholar, she remembered being shocked.
“I thought, ‘Wow. Somebody heard my story,’” she said. “It was really the inspiration for me to keep going.”
Before there was the state of Colorado, there was the University of Colorado; and before there was CU, a courageous and tenacious few were so profoundly committed to the transformative power of an education.
The idea of a public university in the young Colorado territory was considered a valuable and worthwhile pursuit as early as 1861. But political disputes, economic distress and local jealousies stalled the idea from becoming a reality for years. Some folks clamored that Colorado didn’t have any use for an academic institution.