Mikol Aspinwall

I was 13 when I started at Goshen College. I went to a special high school when I was 9 to 13 years old. It was on Arizona State’s campus and designed for early starters. My uncle’s a lawyer downtown, so I decided to look around here for colleges and I found Goshen College. They were pretty accommodating to my situation. I graduated in 2019 when I was 17 years old.

I work at a Silicon Valley start-up called Blink Labs. I also work at mennonite.net. That’s a small non-profit on campus that works in providing websites for Mennonite churches. Also, I work downtown at the Goshen Historical Society. We’re working on a critical project to amplify how tours work downtown so we can make the historical side of Goshen more accessible. This fall, I’m going to be a professor at Goshen College teaching a Swift course. It’s a course about Apple programming. I’m also pretty involved at College Mennonite Church.

Goshen College is a small school, which allows you to be one on one with professors. I was in computer science. That’s a pretty small department, so I got to be one on one with the professor all the time, which was exciting and great. You know everybody. That was really helpful for me, and I think it’s great for anybody to have that sort of community.

There are some world-class professors at Goshen College. That really hallmarked my experience there. I had a class in my last year with Professor Keith Graber Miller. He taught this great class, and I felt like it changed everything about how I think.

Drink Local Labs is a start-up I’m a part of, and our product is called Local. It’s a low-sugar sparkling water with all-organic, all-natural ingredients, and every label is done by a local artist so we can get their art out there. That’s my baby project right now.

Something like Drink Local Labs can succeed in Goshen because people love their art. They love their artistic community here. We have places like The Local and all the artistic ventures around Goshen Farmers Market. It’s pretty cool to see art flourish here.