Last year 23-year-old Carter Cruise was taking college courses and partying with her sorority sisters. This year she’s been nominated for nine AVN awards, the porn industry’s equivalent of the Oscars. Cruise told Cosmopolitan.com how she made the jump to porn, how she handles being a pubic hair trendsetter, and how her relationship with Belle Knox, that other college porn star who hit the scene about the same time she did, has evolved.

I’ve always known since I was really young that I wanted to be in the entertainment industry. I would have never gone to college in the first place if it weren’t for the guy I was dating at the time. I didn’t want to go to college. I wanted to move to New York or LA and figure out my life, but I didn’t want to leave him. I’m not sad I made the decision because I think it worked out for the better. You can’t help how you feel.

I had this kind of realization that I’d been living my life for everyone else and it was making me so incredibly unhappy. So I took a semester off school to focus on myself. I sat down and I made a list of the experiences I wanted to have in life. I want to experience everything, even bad things. Then I made a list of what I am good at.

My whole life I’ve been fascinated with branding and I came up with this idea to create this brand of “Carter Cruise” where I could do everything I wanted to do. I wanted to write, I wanted to act, I wanted to make music, I wanted to do fashion. I was like, “How can I do all of these things in one lifetime?” Porn was the first step because it gave me the capital and the connections to not only build my brand but also to lay the foundations for other creative things that I wanted to get involved in.

I had an experience with a photographer who was in the adult industry, which was a big thing for me. I really felt connected with what he was saying. When he was telling me about the type of people who were in the industry, those people sounded like me. That was a big breakthrough to have that conversation. I took topless photos with him for the first time ever in my life. I’ve always been very modest and very insecure about my body. I took those photos and I was so scared and nervous and felt insecure, like I looked fat. But then I saw the photos and I felt amazing. Being sexy on camera, I felt very connected. Once I didn’t have that fear anymore I just decided to dive in the whole way.

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