For Olivia Copple, Teutopolis has never really been a place she had to discover. It was simply home.

Her mother grew up there, once living in a house near what is now the high school. Her father came to the community after they married. Olivia herself has lived in the same house her entire life, right behind Teutopolis High School, attending Teutopolis schools from kindergarten through her graduation in 2024.

That kind of rootedness has given her a perspective on small-town life that becomes especially clear now that she is a student at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

"I can't even imagine what it would be like to go to school and not even know everybody in your class," she said. "Anytime that's in a movie or a book, that's just crazy to me."

There are tradeoffs, she readily admits, to living somewhere everybody knows everybody. But there is also something difficult to replicate elsewhere.

"You just make those connections for life because of how long you've been together."

And when something goes wrong, as it did when tornadoes recently struck the area, those connections become something more than familiarity.

"Everybody just comes together and helps."

Olivia has begun to understand that community in smaller ways, too. It can be as simple as walking down the street, seeing someone you know and stopping for five minutes to talk.

"It's just small joys."

Those connections helped prepare her for the world beyond Teutopolis in ways she might not have fully appreciated while she was still in high school.

One important bridge was the CEO program, the countywide entrepreneurial experience that takes students out of traditional classrooms and into businesses, conversations with professionals and eventually the creation of enterprises of their own.

Olivia entered the program already thinking seriously about her future. She loved math and imagined studying it in college, but CEO introduced another possibility. Business.

More importantly, listening to entrepreneurs, managers and other professionals helped relieve some of the anxiety she had carried about choosing exactly the right career.

"Most of them weren't doing anything that was related to what they majored in college," she remembered. Others had never attended college at all.

For someone who describes her younger self as anxious and decidedly Type A, the realization was liberating.

"My whole life I've been worried about what I was going to choose or what I was going to do," Olivia said. CEO helped her understand that while the decision deserved careful thought, "it's not a big deal if I don't know for sure."

That freedom ultimately helped her make a thoughtful choice. Olivia considered several universities, including the University of Chicago, Illinois and Missouri, before choosing SIUE, where she received a full-tuition scholarship. She initially planned to double major in mathematics and business before discovering that doing so would likely require a fifth year.

Instead, she found a natural intersection of the two. Data analytics.

The program had only recently been introduced at SIUE, and Olivia now studies data analytics while keeping mathematics as a minor. She hopes the combination might eventually lead her toward continuous improvement work, an area she became familiar with through her father's career at Sherwin-Williams.

CEO prepared her for college in another important way. Networking.

"I just can't really imagine having to do that for the first time in college," she said.

In CEO, Olivia learned how to introduce herself, start conversations and interact with business professionals while still surrounded by familiar classmates and community members. By the time she arrived at SIUE and began doing the same thing with strangers, she had already practiced walking into the room.

Her CEO experience also produced Copple Cakes, the home-based bakery she started during the program. Initially focused on cakes and cupcakes, it has evolved organically as Olivia learned to make sourdough. Now she often simply posts something she has baked online and discovers that somebody wants to order it.

That, too, is entrepreneurship: trying something, noticing what happens and following the opportunity.

Yet perhaps the most enduring thing Olivia carried from Teutopolis to Edwardsville has nothing to do with business.

It is the instinct to build community.

Even at college, she said, students from Teutopolis and nearby towns seem to find one another. One of her roommates is from Teutopolis. Another is from Newton. The geography changes, but something familiar reassembles itself.

"Everybody, in their own way, kind of searches out their own community," Olivia said. "If you're alone, it just makes everything so much more difficult."

Ask what she would tell the anxious seventh-grade version of herself today, and Olivia's answer comes quickly.

"Everything is going to work out, and I don't need to stress out so much."

Perhaps that is easier to believe when you grow up surrounded by people who have spent years reminding you, sometimes in ways too ordinary to notice, that you are never navigating life entirely alone.

For Olivia, leaving Teutopolis did not mean leaving that behind.

She simply learned that home can travel with you.