Colorado School of Mines highlights graduates’ passion for extreme sports

The Colorado School of Mines (Mines) recently highlighted several of its alumni who have pursued their passions in extreme sports post graduation, exploring how their time at Mines influenced their high-adrenaline careers and hobbies.
 
“Just setting up a slackline safely is an engineering problem,” Mickey Wilson, a 2012 graduate of Mines who now travels around the world performing as a professional slackliner, said. “And what you do with your body up on that line — it’s all physics … I spent a lot of my youth working really hard on academics. I still wanted to save the world with solar energy, but I figured my 20s should be for athletics and my 30s could be more for serious stuff.”
 
While some Mines graduates have, like Wilson, turned their extreme sports into a career — such as professional halfpipe snowboarder Maureen Sweet — others, like computer scientist and wingsuit skydiver Derek Parks, have explored them as passions.

The graduates interviewed all highlighted their experience at Mines, located in the kayaking, climbing and mountaineering haven of Golden, as an inspiration.
 
“Risk management was a big part of our curriculum at Mines,” Alan Stevens, a 2012 graduate who completed the March 2015 Iditarod Trail mushing race in Alaska, said. “Maybe it wasn’t about jumping out of airplanes or trying to not freeze to death when you’re out on the frozen ocean, but it translates well anyway.”