Kyra Rivera, a freshman at Fossil Ridge High School, has spent the majority of her life invested in athletics and academics. A lover of getting involved with the community, meeting new people, and living life through new experiences, she says she is “very excited to continue growing throughout high school.”

Rivera has participated in two sports at Fossil this year, volleyball and soccer. She played defensive specialist on Fossil’s volleyball C-Team in the fall and is currently playing outside defender for the Junior Varsity soccer team. Both sports have been long-term commitments in her life; she has played soccer since the age of six years old and she has played volleyball for the past four years.

Rivera has only played for school teams during the span of her volleyball career, but she has played on soccer teams outside of school. During this past season, she participated in club soccer and played as a holding midfielder on the Colorado Rapids Youth team. When asked about her favorite aspect of playing team sports she answered, “I just love the togetherness of both sports, I love them so much. The fact that, especially playing a school sport, you get to meet a lot of people that you might not have known otherwise and you just get a really nice sense of unity, so it’s a lot of fun.”

Rivera has not only experienced this unity in Colorado, though. Over the summer bridging the gap between her eighth and ninth grade school years, she moved to Fort Collins from Normal, Illinois. After living in Normal for nine years, her transition to her new town was, “really stressful and really sad, honestly. I was leaving all my friends behind in Illinois and my family had to do everything by ourselves, so that added a lot more stress to the move.”

Aside from the stress of moving, Rivera did not find solace in her expectations of beginning high school in an entirely new area. She was not excited for high school as a whole, as she expected it to be very overwhelming, and for the teachers to offer more work and less help. Coupled with that, Rivera found herself worrying about making new friends and adjusting to her new life in Colorado. But her worries subsided soon after, “Once I started actually meeting people and school started, everything just became a lot less overwhelming. I started to actually enjoy living here and viewing the move as a positive change instead of a negative one.”

When the school year started, Rivera quickly found herself with something new to focus on. She filled her freshman year schedule with challenging classes such as Algebra II, Pre-AP English, Pre-AP Biology, Pre-AP World History, and Engineering Exploration. Seeing the success she has achieved in these classes thus far—all A’s—she plans to challenge herself even more next year. Her future schedule is packed with two AP classes, a Pre-AP class, Pre-Calculus, and (“hopefully”) ESS and Advanced Chemistry at the same time. “It definitely won’t be easy but I know it helps me to be better prepared for a future of harder and more challenging work, and it’ll hopefully get me into a good college,” she explains.

After high school, Rivera says ideally she would like to be some type of engineer. She acknowledges that it is a difficult goal to achieve, but she plans to work hard in school and take classes that can get her on the path to the future she wants, such as taking engineering and computer science classes. As far as college goes, Rivera knows she definitely wants to attend a university. At this point, she is thinking of attending the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado as most of the majors offered there revolve around types of engineering.

As her freshman year of high school comes to a conclusion, Rivera definitely holds an optimistic viewpoint regarding her future endeavors. “I’m really hopeful for the future. I’m looking forward to going to college and hopefully getting married. I’m really excited about what the future holds for me, and school, my job, my career, and whatever else might happen in my life.”