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Carol Lally '90 graduated with a degree in English.  She is now an intellectual property lawyer.

Neal Baer '78 earned his degree in political science.  He is the executive producer and writer for the hit show "ER."

Colorado U.S. Senator Ken Salazar graduated from CC in 1977. Elected to the senate in 2004, he had been the state's attorney general.

Holly Ornstein Carter '85 received her degree in political science and is now a writer and documentary filmmaker.

Karen Andersen Medville, a research scientist at Arizona State University, graduated in 1985.

Marcia McNutt, president and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, earned her degree in physics in 1974.

Jay Engeln graduated in 1974 with a degree in biology.  He is the 2000 National High School Principal of the Year.

Basketball star Verdel Baskin, an English major from the Class of 1999, is now an El Pomar Fellow.

Laura Hershey, a disability rights activist, graduated in 1983 with a degree in history.

Jazz singer Lorna Kollmeyer, a liberal arts major from the Class of 1980, owns an ornamental plasterwork company.  

Richard Koo, 1982 alumnus with a degree in math, is the co-founder of Vitria.com.

Mountain climber Jake Norton, Class of 1996, was a history-philosophy major.  

Paul Markovich graduated in 1988 with an international political economy major and is the co-founder of MyWayHealth.

J. Ralph Armijo, a business administration major, graduated in 1974 and founded Navidec, Inc. and DriveOff.com. 

Theatre artist Liz Stanton earned her degree in business and economics in 1988.

For Holly Ornstein Carter, life is a passionate experience, and she pursues it with abandon -- taking risks, trying new things, asking for what she wants, and following her instincts.    

All those characteristics informed her decision to enroll at Colorado College. CC fit all her criteria -- a smaller, coed, liberal arts and sciences school. She already knew she loved Colorado, having visited her grandfather here several winters. So, after investigating “all the usual suspects on the East Coast,” she visited the CC campus. “It was a glorious winter day,” she remembers, “one of those bright blue days. As we toured campus, people were smiling, and the students in the class I visited were completely engaged and asking smart questions. The professor was dynamic. I knew CC was my first choice, far and away.”  

During her four years on campus, Holly took advantage of every opportunity, academically and otherwise. “CC was really welcoming and let me take all the risks I wanted to,” she says. Holly was on the swim team, served as the news editor of the Catalyst student newspaper, performed in a play, and hiked, camped, and biked her way through the Rocky Mountains. “At CC, you can try anything and be supported,” she says. “It is all there for the taking.”

After graduation, Holly went to work as a writer for the New York Times. Unlike most other new hires, she hadn’t gone to an Ivy League or journalism school. True to her character, Holly wanted a job there, and she got it. She was part of a team nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for the Times’ coverage of the October 1987 stock market crash, and her work on the editorial page earned her a Publisher’s Award from the Times, a rare honor for a young staff member. “But there were limitations in terms of finding my own passion,” she explains. “In my creative work, I wanted to use more than the written word.”  

When a Henry Luce Scholarship took her to Korea as a photographer -- another passion she discovered at CC -- Holly realized filmmaking was “where word and image intersect,” and she began to pursue that path. Her first project was a PBS documentary on feminist and reproductive-rights advocate Margaret Sanger, which received the Creative Excellence Award from the U.S. International Film and Video Festival and the Golden Apple Award from the National Educational Media Network. She then founded a documentary film festival at Duke University, a connection through a friend from NYT days. “We put together the board of directors -- Martin Scorsese, Robert Redford, Martin Sheen, Ken and Rick Burns, Barbara Kopple -- everybody I’ve ever wanted to work with in the documentary film world or Hollywood.” With those names behind them, Holly and her partner raised enough money to feature a stellar group of films the first year. Now in its third year, the Doubletake Documentary Film Festival is widely respected as the largest such festival in the world.  

Today, Holly is directing and producing her own documentary about her father’s life, helping produce a twice-yearly PBS series called “Media Matters,” and working two days a week at the George Soros’s Open Society Institute, creating and bringing after-school programs to the New York public school system. “I believe implicitly in education and teaching,” she says. “I teach my children as a mother, I teach audiences as a filmmaker, and now I’m working to educate the children of the inner city and trying to bridge the horrible inequity that exists in public schools.”

While preparing to deliver CC’s Opening Convocation address recently, Holly reflected on her foundational years at Colorado College. “Being brave enough to take a risk is really the key to life and to great success,” she says. “CC taught me how to take risks. I learned how to imagine what I want and find ways to make it happen. CC opened up my world to what is possible.”

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