University of Colorado Boulder Common App Supplement


When I arrived at Yawgoo Valley ski mountain for my first day volunteering for Special Olympics of Rhode Island, I had no idea what to expect. I walked into the lodge, approached the volunteer table and introduced myself. The woman behind the table was frantically passing out armband name tags while trying to organize the event. I took my armband, found a chair and started to put on my ski boots. I looked around, and tried to find other volunteers my age. To my dismay, I did not see any. I finished putting on my boots and followed a crowd of older volunteers towards the bottom of the chair lift. The director of the program, now wearing a bright orange coat with a red “Special Olympics” insignia patched onto the left breast was waving to all the returning athletes as they gathered in a circle. I looked around and noticed that the athletes had varying degrees of mental handicap. I hoped I would be paired with an athlete who was a good skier. When the director introduced me to the athlete I would be working with, I was disappointed. I was going to be working with an athlete named Ian. Ian appeared to be significantly handicapped. I took this to mean he would not be a good skier. As we started skiing on the bunny slopes, I noticed that he was skiing the short, easy slope pretty well. Talking with Ian while riding the lifts I recognized that while he did have some form of mental disability, he had done a lot of skiing over his 30 year life. He had skied some of the biggest mountains in New England. Once I recognized that he was a talented skier, we went to the bigger, more difficult part of the mountain. We finished that night having a great time skiing the hardest slopes on the mountain.
As I drove home that night, I felt very disappointed in myself. I took one look at Ian and assumed he was not a good skier because he had a mental disability. I felt that I had robbed him of part of his night by assuming he could not ski the bigger slopes. My initial judgements based on looks were incorrect.
When I went back to the program the next week and in the weeks following, I came in with a different approach. Instead of assuming that an athlete could not ski based on their looks, I let their actions show their ability. As it turned out, not all of them were good skiers. One week, I was paired with a boy who struggled getting down some of the mountain’s easier slopes. However, instead of assuming his skiing ability, I asked the director who had skied with the athlete before and he told me the athlete’s ability. In weeks following, I continued to take the lesson I learned from my night with Ian and tried to avoid judging an athlete by their looks. At the end of the program I was very happy to be able to say that I did my best to allow an athlete’s actions to affect my judgments, not their appearance.
While this was an experience I had coaching mentally challenged athletes, I have done my best to bring the lesson into everyday interactions. Judging a person based on outside observations is a terrible way to go through life. Since my night skiing with Ian, I have put extra emphasis on avoiding prior assumptions about a person before getting to know them. I have interacted with some people I liked and others I did not like over this time. However I have done my best to judge a person on their personality and character as opposed to their looks.

