Sure, making it to the X-Games is tough, especially as a female skier—they only invite 14 athletes—but it’s even harder if you’re can’t spend every minute of every day dedicated to skiing. Right now, 20-year-old Brita Sigourney is doing exactly that: trying to balance schoolwork at UC Davis with a burgeoning skiing career. “I really want to go back to school, but honestly it’s hard to do both,” she says. “It’s weird, because I don’t go to a ski college. My friends are like ‘oh you’re leaving?’ They don’t get it, and my skiing friends, not a lot of them go to college. I’m like a loner in both.” Sigourney, who was second at last year’s FIS Halfpipe National Championships and third the year before, will be competing in Superpipe at this month’s X-Games, her first. After that, with the Olympics potentially on the horizon, she’s becoming even more focused on training and skiing. At last month’s Grand Prix at Copper, where she came in fourth, she says the contrast between the snowboarders, who had been in the Olympics, and the skiers, who hadn’t, was stark. She says everyone she skis with is gunning to be in the Games. Now she just has to figure out how to fit it all in. “I feel like I’m still pretty young, so I have some time to figure it out, but it’s getting to be crunch time,” she says. “The next couple of years are going to be pretty defining.”-Heather Hansman