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Jasmine Dawn looks like your average college student. She’s blonde, attractive, blue-eyed and always smiling. She lives in the dorms, eats lunch at the Union, works on campus and goes to class most days. But what sets her apart from the average UMaine student is that she’s straightedge and LDS. What makes her even more different? She used to have a mohawk and colored hair and used to experiment with the things most teenagers experiment with.

Jasmine is a first-year modern language major. She’s an eighteen-year-old girl from Farmington, New Hampshire. She doesn’t drink, she doesn’t smoke, she abstains from sex until marriage and she attends church every weekend. Is this hard for her? No, she says. “People say it’s hard being straightedge in college, but it’s not a struggle for me because those things don’t tempt me” she explains. Flashback to the 15 year-old Jasmine and you’ll see a girl with a green mohawk, going to hardcore shows and the occasional party on the weekends. Around this time, she began going to church with her grandmother and “decided to follow the teachings of LDS.” She decided to become straightedge and LDS because “[she] had to pick what was best for [her], and deducted that the straightedge lifestyle was best for [her].”

The University of Maine was not her first-choice school. Her dream school is Brigham Young University in Utah, a university where 98% of the students are Mormon. But she liked UMaine after visiting a couple of times and feels a sense of security and place here. “I came from a really small town, where everybody, including myself, is pretty close-minded. But I’ve grown to be a lot more open-minded since being here.” On move-in day her first thought was about being afraid of “having to deal with all these drunk people running around and puking all over the place coming home from parties,” but she’s learned to accept these people and “understand that people live different lifestyles.”

The people who know the 18 year-old Jasmine Dawn could never imagine her as the 15 year-old Jasmine Dawn. But she’s proud of who she’s become and the things she’s abstained from. The biggest problem she’s encountered from her lifestyle is people judging her and “thinking [she’s] lame and that [she doesn’t] go out and do things, because [she has] just as much fun as anyone else.” A daily struggle that she has is the fact that people she met at UMaine don’t know how she used to be, and they don’t understand that she struggles with a lot of temptations here, but she’s remained true to her lifestyle and she continues to have the desire to live the straightedge lifestyle.