During my Sophomore year of high school, I played the role of Emmett Forrest in Legally Blonde. Though I had been doing theatre for years prior, it was this show experience that ultimately made me fall in love with the art form and got me started thinking about pursuing theatre at the university level and beyond. The entire production process was such a positive experience that would ultimately change the course of my life for the best. My co-star, in the role of Elle Woods, was a senior whom I had looked up to for years and who was actively going through the musical theatre college audition process at the time. Before hearing her talk about musical theatre college auditions, I truthfully had not considered that I could major in and pursue a career in something that had never really been much more than an extracurricular activity. Growing up, I always took school very seriously and considered myself a very academic person, so I had imagined that after high school, I would go into business, law, or some sort of science. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to understand that there was nothing else that interested me to the extent that theatre did, and I came to the realization that the thought of never doing theatre again after high school was frankly very depressing. It was at this point in time that I started to treat theatre as more than just something that I did for fun, but something that was a significant part of my identity. 

Soon after, during my Junior year of high school, I was accepted into the Honors Performance Series Choir at Carnegie Hall in New York City. It was the first time I ever traveled to New York, and for the week I was there, I met so many amazing, talented people with whom I felt that I was able to effortlessly connect over our shared passion for music and performance. Coming from a small town in Colorado where most people did not necessarily have much value or appreciation for the arts, I recognized that the friends I made through the Honors Performance Series were the type of people that I felt were missing from my life, as they made me feel supported and seen in a manner I had never felt before. Having the opportunity to sing at Carnegie Hall was such a surreal experience, and I quickly started envisioning a future for myself involving a career as a performing artist living in a major city. 

My third most meaningful theatrical experience took place during my Sophomore year of college in my Musical Theatre BFA program at the University of Miami, when I performed in Titanic The Musical as a member of the ensemble and in the role of Frederick Fleet. My entire cohort was cast in the show together for our college debut, and after working on backstage crew during our first year in the program, it was such a unifying experience to apply the training we had received up to that point to an official staged production. More than this, I will never forget how rewarding it felt to have the honor of performing alongside the upperclassmen we had been glorifying since our first day on campus. As I am now wrapping up the second year of my BFA, I am so incredibly grateful for the countless blessings the performing arts have brought into my life. I have learned so much about myself that I know I would not have been able to uncover if I had gone a different route, and I cannot wait to continue my theatrical journey at the professional level!