The Co-operative Education module plays an important role in the overall Sport and Exercise Sciences programme and begins in the second semester of Year 3. Students are tasked to implement the skills learned during previous semesters of the course but also have to adapt to new challenges throughout the 8-month placement.
Cara Segal (3rd Year SES) sent along this report of her experience so far.
| I’m on my placement at Northeastern University in Boston. I am loving it so far – I am getting so much experience in performance testing and data analysis. I get to work with force plates and velocity testing equipment everyday which I have learned a lot from. It has been amazing working in and seeing the behind the scenes of a Division 1 school and, also, working with sports we don’t typically have at home. I have mostly worked with men’s and women’s ice hockey, men’s and women’s basketball, women’s volleyball, women’s field hockey, and track and field. I think I might be addicted to ice hockey already! That has been my favourite sport to watch and work with by far. My experience with those two teams alone has given me the opportunity to work with two Olympians (who were actually away in Beijing while I was here!) and multiple NHL prospects, one of which was our men’s captain, who has just signed with the Montreal Canadians NHL team and has been starting for them recently. Most seasons are finished now, so we are starting our post-season training and looking back on the past few months to see where the various teams could improve for next year. Right now I am working with the women’s ice hockey athletic trainer doing some data analysis with their equipment from Firstbeat. The work I have been doing recently has got me thinking of what I want to do once I graduate. I have definitely become more interested in athletic training after working with the ice hockey teams trainers and being apart of the team setting. I have looked into doing a Masters in Athletic Training and actually visited Lasell University here in Boston and met with the staff involved in the AT programme. I would love to do it, but its way more expensive to study over here compared to home. We hope that this information will be useful to our students undertaking their co-op in the next academic year and we look forward to welcoming all our current co-op students back to UL in September to hear about all their experiences. |
Dr. Ian Sherwin is the Course Director of the BSc Sport and Exercise Sciences programme, in Physical Educations and Sport Sciences Department (PESS), UL.
Contact: ian.sherwin@ul.ie @ian_sherwin ResearchGate
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