By Audrey Wade, senior

 Sarah Finder, 21 years old and a junior at Friends University, already has the job she has wanted most of her life. She owns a dance studio in Kingman, a town 40 minutes west on Highway 54. It is a drive for this full-time student, but a short one for a lifelong dream.

Finder has been dancing since she was 3 and has owned the studio since her senior year of high school.

At first glance she is a prim and proper ballerina, but Finder grew up on a sheep farm.

“You don’t wanna know where this hand has been,” said Finder, waving her right hand in the air.

Everyday life for Finder means balancing academic classes and homework, showing up an hour before dance classes for warm-ups, dance classes and homework, driving to Kingman every Monday through Thursday and Saturday mornings for work, teaching her 35 students dance classes, running the studio and making it back to her campus apartment in time to get enough sleep to start again in the morning.

Ballet is the focus of the studio, but Finder also teaches the students classical jazz, tap, basic tumbling and gymnastics. When students reach a high enough level, she starts teaching pointe, what ballerinas are most known for.

The students learn more than dance from Finder. All the knowledge she gains from her classes at Friends she passes to her students. How it works is simple.

“I do not like to fail,” said Finder, whose name is pronounced like a car fender. “I don’t like being wrong. I grade myself daily, and I hope that at the end I have more good grades than bad.”

This is only a part of Finder though. The self-described freakishly shy perfectionist has a side that would surprise most.

The girl can rough house.

“She is probably one of the few women that I would actually be afraid would take me down, and I would be in pain,” said junior Amelia Lepping, Finder’s roommate. Looking a the two together it is difficult to believe that with Lepping standing 6-foot-1 next to Finder’s 5-foot-6 frame.

Growing up on a sheep farm with two younger brothers who both quickly outgrew her means that Finder knows how to take care of herself.

“I was the instigator most of the time, and I’m incredibly stubborn so I kind of started most of the rough housing that went on,” Finder said of fighting with her brothers.

Both of her brothers are over 6 feet tall and weigh more than 200 pounds, so when Finder deals with something smaller, she puts up a good fight.

“You don’t see it coming,” said Lepping. “You think she’s being all serious, but inside she’s plotting, and then she’ll just snap and she’ll start going crazy… You don’t think anything of it until all of the sudden she’s just like, ‘Bring it on! Whi-cha!”

Pillow fight with Finder? Be prepared to look as though it was in the middle of a tornado.

Start snapping rags at her? She will get the rags wet, then brush off any hits on her while drawing exclamations from her opponents.

This comes from one of Lepping’s most proud moments with Finder, during a towel fight against Michael Clifford and Nathan Nonhof, both juniors.

“She and I took them on,” said Lepping. “There were sometimes when Sarah just took everyone and would double-hand towel them and finally got it wet and snapped so hard and just toughed it out in this really wonderful way.”

This may come from Finder having two brothers, living as a dancer, or it may just be a part of who she is. Either way, she balances grading herself, running a business, being a full-time student and taking time to breathe.

“She has a very strong but quiet confidence in the way she plays and the in way she goes about her days,” Lepping said. “And that’s something that is going to be so good for the kids that she teaches to look up to. She doesn’t have to have an outspoken, loud confidence for them to see that in the way she lives her life.”