Alumni of the College of Applied Health Sciences have myriad career options thanks to the tremendous diversity of programs. We periodically will put the spotlight on an alum to find out what they’re doing now, what experiences they had and what AHS means to them. This week, we talk to Kelsey Beccue, an RST alum who is development manager for the Urbana Park District.
Q: Why did you pick AHS?
A: Choosing AHS was primarily a function of it being the home of my preferred major—Recreation, Sport, and Tourism.
Q: Which professors had the most impact on you?
A: This is kind of a toughie, but I’ll go with Professor (Cindy) Wachter. I was in the second semester of my sophomore year and still undecided. I had registered for a host of classes, attended them all my first week and promptly dropped them and registered for new ones. One of the classes I registered for was an Intro to Recreation, Sport, and Tourism class taught by Professor Wachter, and I LOVED IT! Once I was in there, I felt like I finally had some sense of direction and selected RST as my area of study. I still had some figuring out to do career-wise, but was finally taking classes that resonated with me.
Q: What course did you most enjoy?
A: I can’t remember the official course title anymore, but I did take a recreation programming class with Lori Kay Paden that was outstanding, and a great “real world” type of experience.
Q: Did you enter AHS knowing your career path, or did AHS help you decide?
A: I definitely did not know my career path when I headed into AHS, but with help from my RST advisor, I got a push in the right direction. When I first came into RST, I thought I wanted a concentration in Tourism Management, but after working through things with my advisor, it became quite obvious that Recreation Management was the right direction for me, and that set me on the course that brought me to where I am today.
Q: Did your AHS experience lead to your current job?
A: Yes—thanks required internship!
Q: What is your current job?
A: I am currently the Development Manager at the Urbana Park District.
Q: What was your favorite on-campus experience?
A: I worked in the concessions division of the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics during college, and getting the opportunity to work the different sporting events was really cool. I attended a lot of sporting events I might not have attended otherwise. The football game days were fun, too. Long, but fun—great crew to work with! Seeing Sara Bareilles perform at Foellinger with some of my best pals ranks highly, too!
Q: What would you say to recommend AHS to a prospective student?
A: I’d say that it’s a great college—it’s smaller so you don’t get lost in the crowd as much, and the faculty and advisors are great!
A funny thing happened to Carson Smith on his way to a career as a physician’s assistant. He “fell in love with health technology.”
Smith graduated in May with a bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Health in the College of Applied Health Sciences, but notably he came to Illinois as a freshman in the inaugural class for the Students Pursuing Applications, Research and Knowledge (SPARK) program.
You could say SPARK sparked Smith’s interest in a new career.
“When I applied to the university, I was a kinesiology major. But I knew senior year of high school, after I had been admitted, that I wanted to switch to Interdisciplinary Health.
Because I wanted to be a physician’s assistant,” Smith said. “When I was filling out the SPARK application, I said I was interested in health robotics. I thought robots are cool, not really knowing much about it. And then once I got in with the SPARK program and started working in the lab, I realized that I love working in the lab and doing research into assistive technologies.”
Smith said SPARK was a catalyst to get into research.
“It is a little bit difficult for freshmen to get involved in research, especially their first semester, so I knew right away that was going to be a great opportunity for me. I knew I wanted to be involved in research of some sort. It’s always been a goal of mine.”
Smith got a great introduction to research as he was placed into Dr. Wendy Rogers’ Human Factors & Aging Laboratory. Rogers, a Shahid and Ann Carlson Khan Professor of Applied Health Sciences, is a renowned researcher in the areas of design for aging, technology acceptance, human-automation interaction, aging-in-place and human-robot interaction, among other areas.
Smith did not know of Rogers’ work, but quickly came to realize he wanted to learn from her.
“Once I got placed in her lab, I did some research and looked at what she was publishing and putting out there. As a freshman, I had no clue what human factors were. And now I want to make a career in working with human factors,” he said. “The SPARK program got my foot in the door.”
Smith so enjoyed working with Rogers that he applied for and was accepted into the Master of Science in Health Technology (MS-HT) program that was spearheaded by Rogers. Smith said working in the Human Factors & Aging Lab helped him “realize there’s a very large need for health technology.”
“I realized that was what I really loved doing, just from really working in the lab,” he said. “It’s going to really prepare me for a successful career in health technology. I’m very interested in assistive tech for older adults, aging in place. If we can keep people out of nursing homes, that’s one of my biggest goals.”
That acknowledgement has led to Smith altering his future plans.
“I have changed what I want to do. I mean, in my life, I have changed it five times. But I think this one’s going to stick. I no longer want to go to physician’s assistant school. I decided last spring, and it was really because I had fallen in love with health technology and looking at things from a human factors perspective.”
Rogers said Smith was a “wonderful addition to our laboratory since he arrived. Initially he was on multiple projects—everyone wanted Carson on their team because he was so reliable. He found his niche on our hypertension medication management system team and has been a key player. It has been a pleasure to watch him learn and grow over the years—I know he will continue to make important contributions in the field of health technology.”
One thing that is clear is that 2022 has been very successful for Smith. In addition to completing his undergrad work and being accepted into the MS-HT program, he also earned a designation of Outstanding for his Undergrad Research Symposium presentation, entitled, ”Development and Iteration of Medication Adherence: Applications for Older Adults.”
Additionally, Smith earned a McKechnie Family Fellowship and this summer, Smith will be working at a human factors in health technology internship in Washington D.C.
Whatever lies ahead for Smith, it is certain it will involve helping people age.
“I have grandparents and great grandparents that always want to be doing things themselves. They don’t want to have to ask other people to do it for them. And just growing up and seeing that, you see that people really do want to be able to take care of themselves, especially as they get older. I think that (explains) a lot of my interest in health technology.”
More than 2 million people live with aphasia in the U.S.
Bruce Willis’ aphasia diagnosis went public in April 2022.
Aphasia is a communication disorder that affects understanding and expression. It can make it difficult to speak, write, listen, and read. But despite its dire impact on people, aphasia is not a well-known condition. In fact, according to a 2016 survey by the National Aphasia Association (NAA), less than 10 percent of respondents knew what aphasia was.
But the announcement in April 2022 that Bruce Willis would be stepping away from acting following an aphasia diagnosis has raised awareness of the affliction, said Abby Franz, a speech pathologist and clinical instructor in the Department of Speech & Hearing Science at University of Illinois.
“I feel awful for the family and his situation and that he has that diagnosis,” Franz said. “But in 2016, the NAA conducted a survey and found only 8.8 percent of the respondents knew what aphasia was and correctly identified it as a language disorder. So certainly Bruce Wilson’s diagnosis can bring awareness to aphasia. But it’s common. More than two million people are living with aphasia in the United States, and for only 8 percent of the general population to know what it is and know that it was a language disorder, that’s pretty significant.”
Aphasia is an acquired communication disorder, Franz said, which means that it’s something that happens during the course of a life. It’s not something that is present from birth. It is an acquired neurogenic communication disorder, usually as a result of a stroke or some type of brain injury, she said.
There are many types of aphasia, and they are usually diagnosed based on which area of the language-dominant side of the brain is affected and the extent of the damage.
“Typically, it is something traumatic like a type of traumatic brain injury, either they’ve fallen, they’ve hit their head, they’ve been in a car accident, which has affected the area of the brain that controls our speech and language, or a sudden stroke that has left them with difficulty with speech and language,” Franz said.
“But there is another type of aphasia called primary progressive aphasia. That is a degenerative disease that is caused by a type of dementia—frontotemporal lobe dementia. It isn’t a sudden onset change in language. It’s a gradual deterioration of brain tissue in the frontal lobe of our brain that causes, over time, kind of your language to really deteriorate and comprehension of language to deteriorate.”
Franz did not want to speculate about whether Willis has primary progressive aphasia (PPA), but said what she read about his diagnosis lead her to believe he is afflicted with PPA.
“When you have a stroke, it just happens, like suddenly onset. So there wouldn’t be this gradual deterioration” of what has been speculated to have happened to Willis, she said.
Primary progressive aphasia symptoms are akin to dementia. Franz said, with primary progressive aphasia, there would be difficulty with word finding, difficulty sometimes with even just the production of speech, or more effortful for them to even just formulate a sound. They may have a loss in just the fluency of speech as well as the comprehension of speech.
“Somebody who has primary progressive aphasia, if I showed him (a pen), he or she may not be able to name it, but then they also may not even be able to tell me what it does. So they lose that ability to even know this is a pen and we write with it,” she said.
As a speech language pathologist, Franz said she makes aphasia determinations based on how patients perform on certain tasks during a language assessment.
“We’re also testing their comprehension of language. We’re looking at their ability to follow simple directions, follow two-step directions. And we’re looking also at their ability to write after a stroke or after a brain injury because sometimes those go hand-in-hand with the loss of language.”
That said, an aphasia diagnosis is not always without hope. With the help of rehabilitation intervention provided by a speech-language pathologist, people with aphasia from a stroke or other brain injury can improve. SLPs partner with people with aphasia and their families to improve communication skills and develop strategies to support their communication strengths, and may assist with using an augmentative and alternative communication speech devices for those individuals if needed.
However, Franz speculates that because Willis’ family said the actor would pull back from public appearances, she believes he has primary progressive aphasia, and that the prognosis for that is not promising. According to the NAA, the average life expectancy from onset of the disease is 8 to 10 years.
“It is that dire when you get that diagnosis,” Franz said. “It’s a very slow progression of the loss of their communication and along with this kind of dementia too that goes along with it.”
Talking about PPA is “very personal” to Franz.
“My parents’ best friend was diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia in 2017,” she said. “And he’s still living. I see the professional side of it. But now I’m living it on a personal note. And it’s been very hard.
“When he got the diagnosis, I had to do a lot of education with my family about it, especially my parents. Because this was their best friend, and he’s been a part of my life since I was born. And you know, I had to educate them a lot about what primary progressive aphasia is and what it’s going to look like at the end of life. So that is not a great diagnosis to have. So I understand, for the family, why they are probably wanting to shield Bruce Willis from being in the public eye.”
When a public figure such as Willis is afflicted, it often brings an opportunity to educate people about a disease or medical condition.
“The National Aphasia Association is a great website and a great reference for anybody to learn more about aphasia or just to understand more about what it is, and find support groups, within your local community,” Franz said. “It’s a great reference and website to look for if you have a family member or know somebody who has been given the diagnosis of aphasia.”
Apsan Bishwokarma looks over notes in a Warrior-Scholar Project class, hosted at the Chez Veterans Center. (Photo by Ethan Simmons)
While Adam Sherman Jr. sat for the two-hour bus ride from Chicago O’Hare Airport to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus, a pit was forming in his stomach.
He’d spent six years in the Navy, stationed in Japan and California for three years apiece, sometimes working out at sea for six or 12 months at a time. But a few preparatory problem sets for the Warrior-Scholar Project’s academic boot camp had him stumped.
“I didn’t know if I’d be able to knock off the dust and the rust to get going in this program,” said Sherman, who grew up in New Jersey.
After spending four days in the camp absorbing astronomy and physics lectures from University of Illinois faculty at the Chez Veterans Center, Sherman’s first taste of higher education was going “really smooth,” he said.
“They broke it down in a way that’s really digestible, and they’re building it up in a way where it’s really fast-paced, but it’s comprehensible,” he said.
This July, 15 student Veterans took classes and teamed up on projects in the Chez Veterans Center, the University of Illinois’ one-stop shop for military-connected students. The center has hosted the nonprofit Warrior-Scholar Project for the three consecutive years.
The Warrior-Scholar Project, or WSP for short, takes place in college campuses across the country as an eight-day higher ed experience for military Veterans of all ages.
The WSP and Chez Veterans Center’s missions are aligned—both are dedicated to easing the transition of military-connected students back into education and civilian life.
“The premise of WSP is really about showing them they can do it, giving them the confidence they can leave the military and go to a place like the University of Illinois,” said Chez Veterans Center Director of Operations Andy Bender.
“I think what’s great for us in particular is (WSP) follows our mission. We’re all about the successful transition from the military into higher education—this is a good steppingstone for it. But it also gets a lot of our campus partners who may not have connections to the military to come and meet these students.”
WSP Education Programs Coordinator Rebecca Mills called Illinois’ Chez Veterans Center one of the program’s “top campus stakeholders,” for going “above and beyond” for student cohorts. A core component for both organizations: Showing Veterans that the talents they’ve built in the service are transferable to the classroom.
“It’s less the content—we know they’re capable, we know they have the experience. But how do they use the skills they developed in the military to be successful in higher ed?” Mills said.
A whopping 88 percent of Warrior-Scholar Project alumni have either obtained a college degree or are on track to complete one (Photo by Ethan Simmons)
Some students, such as Sherman, enter the Warrior-Scholar Project with no college credits. Others, such as Sergio Perez Jr., a 26-year-old Marine Corps veteran from Oklahoma, used WSP to re-familiarize himself with the pace of university life.
When he left the service in October 2023, he “had one goal in mind: and that was to go back and finish my degree,” he said.
“For me, WSP was a ‘two birds with one stone’ type of deal, because University of Illinois was actually one of the schools I’m thinking about applying to in the future,” Perez added. “When I saw they still had openings for this, I thought, ‘You know what? I can do a quick campus tour while still self improving.’ So this has given me a better understanding of how this campus functions.”
A whopping 88 percent of Warrior-Scholar Project alumni have either obtained a college degree or are on track to complete one, according to their internal statistics. This year, Illinois also hosted WSP’s annual alumni conference, where bootcamp graduates return to network and listen to industry professionals with military connections.
A Veteran careers panel discussion included Mona Dexter, Comcast’s vice president of Military and Veteran Affairs; Michael Pett, Uber’s head of Military and Veteran Programs at Uber; Erica Jeffries Purdo, vice president of Strategy and Operations at Johnson & Johnson; and Tommy Jones, senior director of Military and Talent Programs at Walmart.
During the campus visit, the student cohort got to tour Research Park businesses such as Caterpillar’s Innovation Center and Hourglass Medical, a wearable technology company. Before they left campus, Chez staff brought them to a celebratory visit to the Colonnades Club in Memorial Stadium, itself a tribute to U. of I. veterans who fought in World War I.
“Illinois might be one of the best-kept secrets in higher ed; You walk into a building and learn about a Nobel prize winner who invented something you use every day,” Bender said. “We’ve had a couple people who’ve told us, ‘I wanna come here.’”
RST 180 packs 20 field trips into one, two-week-long bus ride
RST 180 examines elements of administration, programming, and facility planning and management to high profile recreation, sport, and tourism destinations.
RST 180, a class that takes students on a tour of some of the country’s best-known sports and tourism sites, returns in 2022 after a two-year hiatus due to COVID-19. But this year’s iteration has some new wrinkles: a visit to Shawshank prison, and funding for the two dozen students-turned-tourists.
The brainchild of Recreation, Sport and Tourism clinical associate professor Mike Raycraft, RST 180 packs 20 field trips into one, two-week-long bus ride. The course, in its fourth year, is part of the RST curriculum at Illinois, where students learn how to deliver a variety of leisure experiences to different populations. This can include anything from managing a professional sports team to running a historical museum to overseeing a state park facility.
The trip runs from May 23 to June 3, with 26 students—half of them freshmen—riding the bus with Raycraft. The group sets out from Champaign and winds through cities such as Cleveland, Cooperstown, N.Y., Princeton, N.J., Philadelphia, Canton, Ohio and Indianapolis, and sites such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Niagara Falls, the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Olympic training site in Lake Placid, the site of Woodstock in Bethel, N.Y., the 9/11 Memorial in Shanksville, Pa., and the Ohio State Reformatory, the site of the movie the “Shawshank Redemption.”
In addition to new places to visit such as the Ohio State Reformatory and the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, this year’s RST 180 has another new feature: donations to offset student costs. The trip costs about $2,100 per student for food and lodging.
The Orange Krush Foundation, a section of the Registered Student Organization Illini Pride, gave a grant of $6,300 to RST 180. Kilton Rauman, a member of the Orange Krush executive committee, said the Orange Krush Foundation thought RST 180 was “a valuable thing to contribute to.”
“I thought that it was a really cool program giving students the opportunity to have those real world experiences,” Rauman said. “And going on a trip that could have such a long lasting impact. I thought that was a good place to support education in the university with something so hands-on.”
The Orange Krush Foundation builds its funding base with proceeds from student basketball and football tickets, Rauman said. The grant from Orange Krush came too late for this year’s trip, but in 2023, three students will get a full free ride.
“I would hate for someone else to miss out because they felt the cost was out of their price range, or something they couldn’t manage,” said Rauman, who was supposed to be on the tour in 2020 before COVID-19 hit. “So I’m happy that three students will be able to know that their trip is safely funded, and that’s not something they have to stress over.”
RST alum Carmen Rossi also made a generous donation to help RST students. The entrepreneur pledged $250,000 over a five-year period to the RST Domestic Site Tour Fund that will go toward paying part of students’ costs for RST 180.
“I live in the community,” Rossi said, explaining his motivation for the donation. “And the community has been amazing. I’m so absolutely fortunate for being able to have experienced the degree of success as a product of the community. And the community is representative of so many different cogs in so many different organizations.”
The donations from Rossi and Illini Pride will be used for future trips and as an enticement for students to join the RST degree program, Raycraft said.
“What I’m hoping is it triggers our alumni to engage,” he said.
Mark Thomas, the now-retired Western District Director for State Parks in New York—which included oversight of Niagara Falls—said you can’t replicate in a classroom what you learn on this trip.
“This class allows the students access to top-level professionals and facilities in recreation sport and tourism venues around the Northeast and North Central United States,” said Thomas, now an adjunct faculty member at Illinois. “And this is rare access that students that might just be going through any program without that access at the level that Mike with his connections and the arrangements in this class that have been set up for these students. They get in the door to places and really see inner workings and talk with people who are boots-on-the-ground people in the profession.”
In addition to Niagara Falls, other highlights included Gettysburg Battlefield and Saratoga Springs, Flight 93 National Memorial, Progressive and First Energy Fields (home to the Cleveland Indians and Browns), the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center, NCAA Headquarters, and Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Thomas said he has been impressed with questions students ask, and the passion they have.
“They’re very motivated to learn,” he said. “They want to draw the most out of the experience. They asked very good questions about Niagara, but they also asked questions about the other parks that I had and what they were like. They are able to glean a lot of information, but then synthesize it on the fly.”
Thomas, who retired shortly after the 2019 tour—the last one before 2022 because of COVID—gives all the credit to Raycraft, whom he met and got to know because of this class.
“When you see the actual operations and facilities on the ground and the variety of them that Mike has scheduled in all three of those arenas, it gives these students a real good, deep look in. And you can’t get that from sitting in a classroom,” he said.
Thomas knows RST 180 can also help shape careers.
“It helps them in several ways. One is, it gives them a perspective of what kinds of work might be available to them and what kind of organizations when they graduate from the program. And I think that’s a real big deal for students. And second of all, it helps them kind of formulate does this track feel right to me, is this a better track for me.”
For Rauman, the RST 180 tour is personal.
“I had a solid foundation knowledge about the trip, because I was signed up to go on it my freshman year, prior to it being canceled by COVID. So I kind of knew a lot of what it entailed, and I did get some details from some class of 2022 classmates. And they’ve talked about how cool the Niagara Falls experience was, and how valuable it was to see not just sporting venues, but also you went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you kind of saw how that operated. The variety of experiences they talked about being valuable, and then just networking, being on a bus with all those people, you can really get a lot closer with them.”
This unique field exploration journey can provide our students and future professionals with lifelong benefits, giving them crucial experience as they move into their professional fields. Please consider making a donation to support this unique student experience: If you’d like to support the fund for the RST 180 Travel Scholarship Fund, please visit this website and fill out the form.
