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's passion for marketing and business is common among Leeds students, but for her, this love was born across borders. Growing up across three countries - Germany, the United States, and France - laid the foundation for an adaptive mindset and a career that was never going to look like everyone else's.

Still, what makes Unsell's story truly compelling isn't just where she's been. It's how she thinks. As an aspiring founder and experienced pitch evaluator with Get Seed Funding, she understands the ins and outs of a startup like few others.��

That dual perspective was earned through years of adapting to new ways of seeing the world. It’s clear that Unsell didn’t just find entrepreneurship in a classroom, rather, she found it watching other people’s parents run the world from a Paris cafeteria, surrounded by classmates whose parents ran multinational companies and government offices across the globe. Already, before CU, Unsell was watching how the world worked.

No Fixed Address

For as long as she can remember, Unsell has always been on the move. Growing up in three different countries shaped the way she perceives experiences and life as a whole.

“Because I'm used to moving around so much, I like having a rhythm of staying in a place for max four or five years, and then moving, or else I get bored.”

Because her mom is half-French and half-German, Unsell was able to pick up new languages better than imagined. Sure, there were some learning curves, but her mom always acted as a supporting vessel, ensuring Unsell would get the most out of her time abroad.��

Unsell lived in Germany from first through third grade, returned to the US for fourth, and by ninth grade was off to Paris. Adaptability became her greatest asset, but that's not to say the journey was without its difficult moments. When she returned to the US after Germany, she tested into an ESL class, a testament to just how fully immersed in German life she had become. For most kids, that would have been a setback. For Unsell, it was just another adjustment.

A Global Spark

When she relocated to Paris for ninth grade, the experience abroad felt entirely different. Older and more cognitively developed, she was able to absorb her surroundings in a way she simply couldn't as a first grader in Germany.

She entered high school at an international school, surrounded by classmates who casually talked about multinational companies and global careers. She felt like an outsider, an average American kid among world-traveling families, but something about that environment lit a spark. For the first time, she started thinking seriously about business.

“All of these kids were talking about, 'I want to go work for this large company,' or 'my dad works for this large company.' It just got my wheels spinning - okay, there's another avenue I could go down."

That curiosity followed her back to Colorado Springs for her senior year, where she joined DECA and took a marketing class that turned a passing interest into a genuine direction.��

When CU offered great in-state tuition and curriculum, she was sold. By the time she arrived at CU Boulder, the decision to study marketing at Leeds felt less like a choice and more like the natural conclusion to everything she had already lived.

Building the Muscle

By fall of 2025, Unsell had already absorbed plenty of knowledge to succeed in the business world. Thus, she decided to apply her entrepreneurial instincts to her start-up, CoTea.��

The startup is a canned beverage that combines coffee and tea. The idea came from a personal problem of her co-founder and boyfriend, . Jackson loves the taste of coffee but is highly sensitive to caffeine. So rather than accepting that as a dead end, the two started researching, eventually discovering that combining coffee and tea is a practice common across parts of Asia and Africa. The result is a creamy, oat milk-based drink that uses decaf espresso and high-caffeine tea, engineered to deliver smooth, sustained energy without the jitters.��

Getting there, though, was anything but smooth. Early formulation rounds fell flat, and the flavor profile they had envisioned proved too complex to execute. So they regrouped, and flew out to California to work directly with a formulator.

The trip really became a learning experience for them on a broader scale rather than about the drink itself. For Unsell, the process became more about what it demanded of her, and building CoTea forced her to tap into her entrepreneurial mindset. In other words, it was exactly the kind of experience that turns a business student into an entrepreneur.

While Jackson and Unsell aren’t sure how or if CoTea will continue, it’s given them many lessons they hope to apply to future ventures.

The Other Side of the Table

Unsell's entrepreneurial education didn't stop at building her own company. As a pitch evaluator with Get Seed Funding, CU's student-run seed funding program (part of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative), she found herself on the other side of the table entirely.

The role gave her a perspective that most student founders never get. Having experienced the vulnerability of pitching an idea firsthand, she now understands exactly what separates a compelling pitch from a forgettable one.

"I used to think entrepreneurship was so unapproachable - like you had to have all this money and be the smartest person in the room. No, you don't. You just have to have grit and want to push through challenges."

After evaluating countless pitches, patterns started to emerge. She’s learned that students at CU are generally very strong pitchers. However, she’s picked up some common mistakes, like a lack of customer discovery. She finds many founders walk in without any quantifiable evidence that people actually want what they're building. Beyond that, she points to a failure to break down how the money would actually be used, and a lack of confidence that undermines an otherwise solid idea. It’s lessons she can apply to her future entrepreneurial career.

Overall, the role continues to sharpen her own instincts. Every pitch that walks through the door teaches her something new about what it means to build something from nothing.

Just The Beginning

Unsell is set to graduate at the end of the current spring 2026 semester, but her personal experiences and extensive knowledge across multiple areas has given her a leg up on her peers.

Few students leave CU with the kind of perspective she has built. She has navigated three different cultures, learned a foreign language by pure immersion, watched the global business world up close from a Paris classroom, built a product from the ground up, and spent years evaluating the ideas of others. Most people wait until they're handed an opportunity to start flexing that muscle. Unsell has been repping it since first grade.��

That's the thing about entrepreneurship as a muscle: the earlier you start training it, the stronger it gets. And the reps don't always look like what you'd expect. For Unsell, they looked like surviving a German elementary school without speaking the language, feeling like an outsider in a Parisian cafeteria, and flying to California to salvage a formulation that wasn't working. None of it felt like entrepreneurship in the moment, but in hindsight, it all was.

“Entrepreneurship is a muscle. The more you do it, the more you keep a lookout for problems to solve. I now keep a lookout for it everywhere. You just start looking for problems.”

After graduation, Unsell will join Deloitte's consulting practice, with her sights already set on an international office. The muscle, it seems, is far from being finished.