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Alumni Spotlight—Alex Dam

May 20, 2020 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

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 Alex Dam, who got his degree in 2017 in Recreation, Sport, and Tourism with a focus on Sport and a Minor in Communications and who is now a Associate Manager Content Strategy at NBC Sports.

Q: Why did you pick AHS?

A: I picked AHS due to my interest in the RST program. Recreation, Sport, and Tourism is one of the largest growing industries in the world today and I just knew I wanted to be a part of it. I had a concentration on Sport and really enjoyed both learning and experiencing how much sport brought people together and helped improve quality of life. Sport brought me closer to my loved ones and has helped me create lifelong friendships and when I figured out, I could study this field, I knew I had to take advantage of this opportunity.

Q: Which professors had the most impact on you?

A: Although no longer with the University of Illinois, both Dr. Nuno Ribeiro and LoriKay Paden left a great impact on me during my time at Illinois. Both would walk into class with all the energy in the world, whether it was a 9 a.m. RST 330 (Programming) course or a post-lunch 2 p.m. RST 410 (Administration of Leisure Services) course. Both helped me develop academically in the classroom and professionally outside of it. I have maintained contact with both and have enjoyed seeing them on their journeys as well as sharing mine.

Q: What course did you most enjoy?

A: The course I enjoyed the most was RST 484! A combination of real work experience and finally seeing all your course work pay off was very special. The culmination of my four years at Illinois combined with the start of my professional career made this course truly special. During my internship, I was able to meet and develop friendships with other RST in my program that I did not have the chance to meet on campus and this helped expand my AHS network.

Q: Did you enter AHS knowing your career path, or did AHS help you decide?

A: I did not enter AHS knowing my career path. This was scary to admit and one that I think many students also worry about. AHS helped me decide my career path by developing a curriculum that exposes their students to professional settings. The practicum/internship allowed me to determine what I did/did not want in a career and that is very important. It helped me mold my ideal career without me knowing it at the time.

Q:Did your AHS experience lead to your current job?

A: My AHS experience did lead me to my current job. The internship I pursued during my final semester at Illinois allowed me to secure my first full-time job at ESPN (Format Analyst), which in turn led me to my current role at NBC Sports (Associate Manager Content Strategy).

Q: What was your favorite on-campus experience

A: My favorite on-campus experience is developing lifelong friendships with fellow students and eating at all the awesome restaurants on campus. I love food, so being within walking distance of Green Street was awesome! Those relationships continue today, and I am glad to see where everyone has come since all our RST classes together. It makes me proud to see that we all were able to do something we love and make a career out of it!

Q: What would you say to recommend AHS to a prospective student?

A: I would say take the leap of faith. I too was looking at more prominent majors before I decided to pursue something I loved. You need to understand the industry you are going to takes a lot of relationship-building, persistence, and being able to take rejection/feedback positively. However, AHS will prepare you for all these things and definitely do not hesitate to reach out to peers and alumni like myself. We are all here to help! RST is also a multibillion-dollar industry and is growing every single day. Especially at times like this when we are told to stay indoors without sports, we realize how much we miss going out to our state parks, visiting other countries, and cheering on our favorite teams.

Editor’s note:

To reach Vince Lara-Cinisomo, email vinlara@illinois.edu.

Tags: Alex Dam, alumni, Alumni Spotlight

Podcast: A Few Minutes With … Clarion Mendes and Amanda Lawrence on non-essential care during COVID-19

April 10, 2020 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

*The Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology Clinic (Photo provided)*

Vince Lara of the communications office of the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois speaks with Clarion Mendes, clinical assistant professor and director of Clinical Education in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science, and Amanda Lawrence, clinical assistant professor in SHS, about the impact of COVID-19 on so-called non-essential health issues such as speech-language pathology and audiology and how those patients are treated.

Listen to the podcast

Transcript

VINCE LARA: Hi. And welcome to another edition of A Few Minutes With, the podcast that showcases Illinois College of Applied Health Sciences. I’m Vince Lara. And today I’m speaking with Clarion Mendes and Amanda Lawrence from the speech and hearing science department to talk about how the SHS clinics are impacted by the coronavirus crisis. I know Speech and Hearing Science operates the Speech-Language Pathology Clinic and the audiology clinics. And are those still open?

CLARION MENDES: So that’s a great question. The physical location of the clinic is currently closed for the safety of our clients, our patients, our families, and our students and staff. So we’re following CDC recommendations as far as that’s concerned. However, like most of the rest of the world, we are diving deep into the world of telepractice, tele-interaction. So from the speech-language pathology standpoint, we have started to introduce telepractice for our patients and clients, and their families.

For audiology, it’s a little bit more complicated because of the types of equipment that are often used for audiological assessment and intervention. So what we’re doing currently for audiology patients is working with them to make sure that their hearing aids are up and running appropriately and making sure that their equipment is running smoothly. So repairs are still up and running for audiology.

VINCE LARA: How do you get hearing aids repaired without having that kind of face-to-face interaction?

AMANDA LAWRENCE: So there’s a couple things. So if a hearing aid’s malfunctioning, everything from– sometimes we can talk them through it. Because there’s a handful of things you just do to start, like, say, diagnosing what the issue is. And sometimes that fixes the issue. So that can be everything from just talking them through appropriate cleaning, just making sure there’s not wax that’s the problem or a microphone that’s blocked to that extent.

So once we’ve worked through that, if need be– current pandemic– one of the things that we can do is, if a patient were to– most of what I need to know in trying to assess or diagnosis is what their problems or the difficulties are, what’s happening with the actual instrument.

They could bring it in without– either drop it– I mean, set it on a bench or a t– outside the clinic. I would be there at the same time, pick it up, go in the clinic, diagnose it. I mean, figure out what’s happening– does it need to be sent in? Is it something I can replace or fix in the clinic?

Once I verify that it’s functioning properly, I can clean it back off and disinfect it, and set it back somewhere for the patient to come back and pick up. I mean, it would be sitting there in the meantime, so not just sitting out for somebody to just come by and pick it up. So that can be done.

And most the time, the same thing can even happen even if they need– if it’s a sound– like if I need programming adjustments, those kind of things. Usually, most, vast majority, 90% or better, I can do without the patient sitting there at all.

The only issue I would have is sometimes the problem is actually wax in the patient’s ear. And I cannot do anything about that without seeing or touching the patient, though medical offices are open. So primary care or somebody could do that. But most things I can assess or take care of just by their feedback. It works.

VINCE LARA: You raise a good point, though. What are some of the complications for getting care for what people might deem as non-essential care during this time? And I think you know you bring up one of them. If a patient has an ear wax issue that’s going to affect their hearing aid, I don’t know, is that considered essential care? Is that something they could go to get care for?

AMANDA LAWRENCE: I don’t know how they’re doing it. Do we know how the system is set up here? So this I can tell you, just because I’ve had a friend who’s had to go in Florida, who’s in the same kind of stay-at-home.

So what they were doing was, well patients, not, say, for a primary care, they were doing those all in the morning. And if anyone– ill or sick, then they were separating them out and seeing them in the afternoon so that they disinfect in between. So I can tell you there. I haven’t tried to go to the doctor here, so I don’t know what that means here.

I don’t know if Christi and Carl are not seeing any well patients at all, if a patient or somebody called and said, I cannot hear at all, and this is the reason, like if somebody said they could not hear, if it would actually be considered a medical emergency. And if it ended up just being earwax, that would be a great day for their PCP. I mean, because that’s something they can actually fix.

VINCE LARA: And Clarion, for someone with a speech-language issue, how would that be handled? And is that considered essential care or not?

CLARION MENDES: That’s a great question. So it’s going to depend quite a bit on the particular type of diagnosis that we’re dealing with. So for instance, one of the specialties of speech-language pathologists is dysphagia, or difficulty eating and swallowing. And dysphagia is often frequently coupled with respiratory issues.

So for speech-language pathologists that are working in a acute care setting or an ICU, they’re going to be pretty busy right now. And those services are kept up and considered essential. And of course, it’s going to vary on a case-by-case basis from medical facility to medical facility. Something that we’ve been seeing a lot right now is, for individuals that have acquired neurogenic language or cognitive issues, having SLPs who can communicate with individuals to explain what COVID is and what their limitations are currently. That’s something that has also been popping up in their speech-language pathology community quite a bit.

VINCE LARA: Clarion, I’m directing this toward you only because I know you’ve worked with geriatric populations a lot. And in fact, I think you’ve said in the past it’s your favorite population to work with. Since they’re most at risk at this time, what extra steps, if any, would you have to take to ensure their health?

CLARION MENDES: So that is incredibly difficult right now, both from the that they’re staying healthy, because they are at the highest level of risk of contracting the virus, but the other challenge is– I don’t mean to stereotype, but they’re not digital natives. And so currently, the way that the world is going with managing all aspects of health care in this current state is to do everything as digitally as possible. And so because they’re not digital natives, this has been very, very problematic.

I can speak for– I think I speak about my grandmother a lot when I’m interviewed by you, Vince. She’s currently 89 at home. And she’s talking with my parents on the phone, but she’s excluded from the family Zoom meetings and all that kind of thing. So I wish I had a great answer for you, but currently I don’t.

VINCE LARA: And Amanda would you– how about from an audiology side of things?

AMANDA LAWRENCE: It’s the same. That’s [INAUDIBLE]. It’s how tech savvy they are or have interest in being. So some, it’s just frightening all the way around. And there is no interest, little interest, more just out of the anxiety of it or misunderstanding of it. And then some are interested, if you can help them work through it and how well you can do that via telepractice, or just some really does depend on auditory skills. I mean, there is something about telepractice that does depend on the institution.

And the other issue with hearing aids and the older population is, when we have declining visual acuity, hearing aids are very small. Everything about them is very small. So sometimes that alone is one of the things that they need more support with or something they miss clinic when the clinic is an open, because I’m asking them to look for something or wax in an area that’s about the size of the head of a pin. And if your visual acuity is not there– it’s not because they’re not trying. It’s because they can’t see it, so the same issues.

But we have a lot of– I mean, the older population around here a in Champaign-Urbana is definitely a little bit of a sliver or a slice of just a very unique group in that many tend to be retired professors. And so they sometimes have an interest, or at least more inclination, into things that are different, and a lot of times, I would say above average willingness to try. Something that’s a little bit different, particularly in my hearing aid population, which can certainly be helpful. But that doesn’t change their visual acuity or the dexterity issues that can come with managing hearing aids.

VINCE LARA: We’ve touched on telehealth a little bit. But I’m wondering, in general, how has the buy-in been from patients with calling them about issues?

CLARION MENDES: So I’ll get started with that. This is Clarion. I have jumped in, maybe cart before the horse, with telepractice with many of my voice clients. And I was tentative. I was nervous.

But surprisingly, the buy-in has been pretty good. And I think the reason is, one, I have found overall everybody is in this mood of, we’re all in this together. We’re collaborating together. We’re all figuring out those unknown territories together. And so people have been extraordinarily gracious and understanding that this is something we’re all working through.

And I’ll say, as far as my client population, a lot of folks are stuck at home. And so people are just happy to have a piece of normalcy, even if it’s delivered in an alternate model. And so, so far it’s been it’s been very positive.

And we’re starting to work with this with children as well. And there’s some great evidence that suggests that telepractice works very nicely with kids. And to be honest, I think parents are grateful to have somebody else be educating their children and supporting their communication needs right now during this complicated time.

VINCE LARA: That’s well put. How about you, Amanda? Are you finding the same thing?

AMANDA LAWRENCE: Yeah. So in audiology and telepractice, you are more limited to being able to give some type of verbal instruction with a device. Otherwise, a lot of what we do is diagnostics, which, it does not lend. Because we have so much equipment. It does not lend to telepractice as well. But making the contact, or to know that somebody can be there via– even if that is just phone, but if it needs to be talked through, that kind of thing, that there is an availability there. But in general, large swaths of what we do, if it’s diagnostic in nature, the equipment just isn’t available to be supported through telehealth practices, telepractice.

VINCE LARA: And I think that works well with what my final question is, is that, what are students doing to replace internships, replacing what have to be in-person internships? Clarion, do you want to start with that?

CLARION MENDES: That’s a very interesting question. So I have been e-mailing and calling my certifying body, the American Speech-Language Hearing Association, the Council on Academic Accreditation, the Illinois Department of Federal and Professional Regulation, the Illinois Board of Higher Education, and many other entities. Because currently, students are not allowed to participate in telepractice and count it for their certification in the state of Illinois for speech-language pathology and audiology.

As of this recording, every other state permits it for speech-language pathologists. But Illinois is an isolate. So we have been working pretty around the clock to try to get our Practice Act updated so that students can participate in this important aspect of care that I imagine is going to be just becoming more and more common in our current state of affairs.

So that’s something we’ve been working towards. And we check the updates daily, sometimes hourly, for changes in telehealth rules, regulations, and certification. So this has been keeping me up day and night. I have not gotten much sleep recently, to tell you the truth.

CLARION MENDES: I am overjoyed to share this update with you since you interviewed Dr. Lawrence and me on Friday, April 3, 2020. The Illinois Practice Act for Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology has been revised. Effective today, April 6, 2020, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, is allowing, through 7/31/2020, students of speech-language pathology and audiology, to provide their services via telepractice, provided that, per best practice, there is a licensed and certified clinician overseeing all services in real time. This variance is congruent with current best practice for speech-language pathology and audiology, and allows our students to successfully continue a high quality, clinical education while meeting the communication needs of our community during a pivotal time in health care. We are excited to step up and offer this medium of service delivery to our current and future clients. This opportunity, for our energized and dedicated students to offer services with the supervision of experts, allows us to maintain and enhance our standing as a highly-ranked program in audiology and speech-language pathology.

VINCE LARA: Well, I appreciate you both being on today to talk about these really important issues. And I hope that we can see a return to campus and to normalcy very soon. My thanks to Clarion and Amanda.

For more podcasts on Illinois College of Applied Health Sciences, search A Few Minutes With on iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, radio.com, and other places you get your podcast fix. Thanks for listening, and see you next time.

A Few Minutes With … adjusting to online instruction during COVID-19

April 14, 2020 | Vince Lara

Handling the transition to online instruction

Vince Lara of the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois speaks with Keiko Ishikawa of the Speech and Hearing Science Department and Neha Gothe of the department of Kinesiology and Community Health about the transition to online instruction at Illinois.

Watch the interview

Transcript

VINCE LARA: Hi, and welcome to another edition of “A Few Minutes With,” the podcast that showcases Illinois’ College of Applied Health Sciences. I’m Vince Lara, and today I’m speaking with Keiko Ishikawa of Speech and Hearing Science and Neha Gothe of Kinesiology and Community Health about the transition to online instruction during the coronavirus crisis.

So just a simple question, where are you setting up in your house as you transition into this world of online instruction?

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: Well, I actually set up a home office at my house. I didn’t have a really official space from home before. But we actually created a room for me to work in next eight weeks.

VINCE LARA: That’s great. How about you, Neha?

NEHA GOTHE: Yeah, I think a similar situation for me as well. We have an office space in our house. And so I have a standing desk. I was able to connect with the AHS IT team and get all the more access softwares that I need on my laptop so I am able to access– and also remotely access my office computer if I need some documents or some softwares.

VINCE LARA: Have either of you had online instruction prior to this, whether it’s with Illinois or any other university?

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: I will start. So yes, I actually tried to make a hybrid course last semester for AHS 300, which is the undergraduate level anatomy and physiology course. So in that class– in half of the class, which is almost all the lectures, were done online. And then class met for laboratory activities. So I was not new to this type of online instruction. But full online instruction is a first for me.

VINCE LARA: How about you, Neha?

NEHA GOTHE: Yeah, this is completely new for me. I have never taught online classes before in any small or big capacity. So this was a first transition for me to use an online software, such as Zoom which has worked really well for us thus far, and connecting with students. And also trying to then adjust your syllabus coursework, grading rubric accordingly so things move on to a smoother transition.

I think in this situation what certainly did help was I was able to see and connect with my students for the first half of our semester. And so the students know me. I can put a name and a face together when I’m on Zoom with more than 100 students in one of my classes. And so it does certainly help to have had that in-person interaction prior to just switching to online.

VINCE LARA: Yeah, I’ve heard that anecdotally as well that that helped having that first part of the semester interaction. Do either of you think that this kind of experience would make it more likely that you’d be involved in online instruction in the future? Why don’t you start, Neha.

NEHA GOTHE: For me, certainly. I think I have already been thinking and brainstorming about ideas in which I could either transition my course to an online course or perhaps think of a hybrid format. So perhaps meeting in person for once a week and then doing some other activities for the course remotely. And I think to some extent it does work to my advantage being in the field of kinesiology and community health.

All our coursework is very applied, at least the coursework that I teach in the context of health and behavior, health promotion, exercise and health, psychology. These are all the things that are very practically, very applicable to students. A lot of my assignments involve students to try something with their family or friends. And so I can really see this connection where I could do certainly the theory and instruction in person once a week and perhaps connect with my students remotely in a hybrid format.

VINCE LARA: And Keiko, what do you think?

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: Yes, it really, in a good way, forced me to be creative and think what else I can do for the class that I haven’t been preparing for online courses. And like Neha said, my classes typically are also very applied, so there’s some concrete knowledge that our students need to develop. And then those things are easily communicated via online courses or prerecorded lectures. So it’s really reasonable to do a hybrid format.

VINCE LARA: There are advantages to working from home, no commute, no dressing up. But are you– let’s start with you, Keiko. Are you enjoying working from home?

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: Yes and no, I would say.

VINCE LARA: Yes.

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: Yes because no commute. And it’s nice to have two minutes to my lunch break.

However, there are challenges. And also I’m missing my colleagues. It’s not the same. I’m all by myself in the house. So that is a disadvantage, I think.

VINCE LARA: And Neha, what do you think?

NEHA GOTHE: Yeah, I think even for me, I think the biggest change was not seeing any of my colleagues and students. So I think I had to get adjusted to that or trying to see them through Zoom meetings and online meetings that we set up. But in terms of working from home itself, I feel like sometimes it has been a struggle to draw boundaries just because you are at home.

You wake up. You get on with your work. And you’re just working all day. And so I feel like when I used to come into work at the university, I had kind of fixed hours. And I know that once I left my office, it was time to do other things. But that boundary has been shifted a little bit.

It’s a little more loose when I’m working from home. So there has definitely been some adjustments that I have made, and a schedule that I have created. And just some logistical edits that I have made my calendar, so that way, I can stay on task and still have kind of a work hour routine through the week.

VINCE LARA: Keiko, you mentioned technological challenges. Talk about some of those. Is it Zoom itself? Is it something else that’s been a challenge particularly?

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: OK, technological challenges. Well, I’m not sure at this point technological challenge-wise. So I haven’t tried the Zoom instruction– synchronous instruction this week.

VINCE LARA: OK.

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: That was just because we were not sure about the bandwidth, whether that was standard for all the classes to meet. So we’ll figure it out. We’ll test it out and see how that goes little by little. So I guess unknowns, what is that technology capable of and how much is what it can take is a challenge at this point.

VINCE LARA: Neha, what about you?

NEHA GOTHE: Yeah, I think since we’ve been transitioning to working from home and also having lectures online, I think without an IT department, you are really your own person to solve your tech problems. And so I think some of the most common issues I’ve had this first week after spring break is usually to do with low internet or poor internet connections, either on my end or on the other person’s end– either the student or a colleague.

Occasionally, some low quality video calls similar to the bandwidth situation that Keiko mentioned, and maybe sometimes some softwares or program which I wish I had access to and which are loaded on my work computer. But I don’t necessarily have an easy connection unless I do a remote access and jump through a few other hoops.

VINCE LARA: Right. Keiko, you mentioned you haven’t had synchronous classes yet, but I’m just wondering, maybe you can answer this anyway. What’s student participation been like?

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: So what I have done is– so I have asynchronous part, which I prerecord lectures, as I told you earlier. And so they’re supposed to watch this and work on the assignments. So it is, in a way, the classroom arrangement.So I have office hours that I established. And they are supposed to– I mean, they’re not supposed to, they are welcome to join me anytime, ask questions. This week in particular, I think they’re still adjusting. So only a few students have participated in the office hours. I’m hoping to see more faces virtually.

VINCE LARA: And how about you, Neha?

NEHA GOTHE: Yeah, the same for me. We’ve tried both with asynchronous and then, like Keiko does, recording my lectures and then posting a video. I’m really learning a lot about all of the features you can have, even built in Microsoft PowerPoint, when you can do your narration. And then you can also have your audio and screen slideshow recorded.So that as well as complementing it with the Zoom and being able to record your video in Zoom and screenshares. I think those two have been my go-to this first week, and both of them have worked really well for us. Also, one of the classes I teach is a lecture and discussion class. So it’s KINES 201, that’s Physical Activity Research Methods.

It’s a large class. It’s over 100 students. And I lecture for the class twice a week. And the students break out into smaller discussion groups with their teaching assistants for more in-depth knowledge and practice. And so those lab sections, my teaching assistants have been absolutely enjoying the synchronous through Zoom. I think they enjoy seeing the students.

Because it’s a small group, there is more of the possibility of having some more conversations and Q&As. And my TAs tell me that they absolutely love it. So I think there are definitely pros to both, and both have worked really well for me thus far.

VINCE LARA: Yeah, it’s interesting that you mentioned that because I was going to ask next about lab work or similar in-person instruction. And have either of you thought about or even started working on workarounds to lab work? Or even now that we can’t do in-person data collection any longer or in-person instruction, how do you work around those limitations? Keiko, you can answer first.

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: Yeah, I can start. So we actually were very timely in this matter that the US publishing online service study, which was just approved by IRB. So we were just in time to do this, and we are launching actually a survey risk of vocal injury in university faculty. And we included some of the questions regarding how this transition to online teaching have affected your voice use and whether you are feeling like your voice is getting tired more and what not. So that’s one of– actually just coincidentally is something that worked for us.

But at the same time, we are also looking into doing some experiments online. For example, we do speech perception studies, which listeners listen to some stimuli and then give us responses. So we are working very quickly to transition to online format for this kind of experiment.

VINCE LARA: Neha?

NEHA GOTHE: Yeah, so for us, it was a little bit different. We were amidst one of our research studies where it was a site-based exercise trial. So we invited participants to come to campus and exercise with us for a period of 12 weeks. And we were right smack in the middle. We were at week 6.

And so now, with no face-to-face in-person interaction, we have had to transition our exercise sessions remote or online. And then it’s been working well so far. We were a little bit hesitant since our population is older adults. And so we weren’t sure about how technology would be embraced by them.

But we’ve had Zoom meetings, again, synchronous Zoom exercise classes with our participants. And things have worked out really well so far. This has been the first week. But thus far, we’ve had less technical issues than I had anticipated.

For our study measurements, we have been trying to explore other opportunities and services, either through the university IT department or some other commercially available softwares. Qualtrics is a great resource that is available through the university. So for any questionnaire data that researchers might want to collect, Qualtrics would be a great place to launch your surveys online. And I’m connecting with some other colleagues in professional organizations to get some sense of how some of those other unique measurements could be collected online, which are not necessarily as simple as questionnaires.

VINCE LARA: I’m wondering what you both think of take-home exams. Why don’t you start, Keiko.

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: OK. Yes, exam is- how to administer exam online is something that I have to think about and I’m still making my plans for the final exam. Obviously, you cannot do a simple multiple choice questions–

VINCE LARA: Right.

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: –as you may do in the classrooms. So we need to alter the format of the questions and the type of questions you ask. So that is a challenge for sure. It will be much more time intensive on the side of graders. So yes, I’m finding that is a challenge.

VINCE LARA: And how about you, Neha?

NEHA GOTHE: Yeah, so I’ve been trying to go back and look through my rubric and grading rubrics. Thankfully, a variety of my assignments were online for students to do because they were take-home assignments. They had to try different kinds of exercise routines, and do a self-reflection about it. Or they were experiential activities. So those are largely unaffected by this transition.

But the exams, for sure, I’m connecting with my teaching assistants. And we are trying to make some judgment about what did we want students to know and learn for the course, and is there a way to evaluate that learning without having to do an exam necessarily. So we are also exploring other opportunities for grading, maybe adding in an assignment or two, or doing an in-person Q&A, or using some based polling during a class to make sure that the students have understood the content.

So I think my focus has—it was always to make sure that the exams are meant to evaluate the learning for the student in the course. But given this transition to an online format, I’m trying to explore ways in which I could test that learning in other settings.

VINCE LARA: Do either of you have students who are on internships that have gotten interrupted? And what do you do about that? Neha, if you want to handle that first.

NEHA GOTHE: Yeah, we have every semester between, I would say, 5 through 20 undergraduate research assistants. Since a lot of my research is campus-based, we have participants—research participants will come to our labs and participate in a variety of exercise, and fitness, and cognitive activities. We have had an army of undergraduate students who help us with all that in-person assessment and training.

So for them, I have had to creatively think of ways in which they could do other things remotely and still get somewhat of a research experience. So we have been doing and brainstorming ideas, such as doing an online journal club. So that would involve me giving an overview of the research process more towards the end of publications, manuscripts. How do we find the correct evidence? How do you read a journal article?

So for a lot of our undergraduate research students, these are new experiences, and they’re a little bit different from their day-to-day collection that they are used to. So I’m just exploring other ways in which I could give them glimpses of the research spectrum and the research experience without necessarily for them having to come into a lab and collect data.

VINCE LARA: Right. And Keiko, how about you?

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: OK, so for research experience in my lab, they are able to do a lot at home online. So we are not severely affected by it. Except that we were collecting data from audio screening clinic where we had a face-to-face interaction with the participants. So that had to stop.

And then that was—that is affecting a bit of the graduate students who are getting clinical practicum hours through the clinic. But that is only tip of an iceberg. We, as a clinical training program, our graduate students are severely affected by losing training sites, like schools and hospitals. They are unable to do their training at this point for indefinite time. We are very concerned about this.

And telehealth seems to be a really good solution to this problem. However, right now, we have a regulation where the telesupervision is not allowed. So we are quickly working to see how we can petition for changing this regulation, at least for the moment.

VINCE LARA: My thanks to Keiko and Neha. For more podcasts on Illinois’ College of Applied Health Sciences, search “A Few Minutes With” on iTunes, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Radio.com, and other places you get your podcast fix. Thanks for listening, and see next time.

Tags: A Few Minutes With, Department of Health and Kinesiology, Department of Speech and Hearing Science, Keiko Ishikawa, Neha Gothe, Podcast

A Few Minutes With … Toni Liechty

March 06, 2020 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

*Toni Liechty (Photo by Brian Stauffer)*

Vince Lara speaks with Toni Liechty, an associate professor in the department of Recreation Sport and Tourism to talk about her research on why people get involved in fitness programs, what keeps them involved, and how life stage and body image impact that involvement.

Listen to the podcast

Transcript

VINCE LARA: Hi, and welcome to another edition of A Few Minutes With, the podcast that showcases Illinois’s College of Applied Health Sciences. I’m Vince Lara and today I’m speaking with Toni Liechty, an associate professor in the Department of Recreation Sport and Tourism, to talk about her research on why people get involved in fitness programs, what keeps them involved, and how life stage and body image impact that involvement.

All right. Sitting with Toni Liechty. Toni, thank you for being on the podcast. I really appreciate it. You know, commonly, when I meet with faculty, I ask them about their inspirations for their research. Because usually, there’s something that inspired you to look at what you study. And so for you, how did you get interested in your line of study?

TONI LIECHTY: So, I think maybe I might be a little different than some folks. I never had any interest in doing research or becoming a professor at all. In my field, in recreation sport and tourism, a lot of people go into the profession. And it’s not as common to go into research. And I thought that’s what I was going to do.

I used to work at a summer camp that was a sport and fitness camp. Which means that a lot of parents sent their kids there because they wanted them to lose weight. And while I was there, I in some ways saw that it was an amazing place for kids to come. I heard some kids say things like, I feel really comfortable at camp because I don’t feel like I’m going to get bullied because of my weight and things like that.

At the same time, I saw some things that were really problematic. You know, kids would share stories of how they would lose five pounds over the weekend and these sort of unhealthy weight loss issues. Another thing that I heard that kind of broke my heart was, I still remember a camper telling me that she said, I love swimming. It’s one of my favorite things to do. But I only swim at camp because at home, I don’t want to be the fat kid in the pool. And it kind of broke my heart that she would have something that she loved to do that would be good for her, but her body image made it so that she felt that she couldn’t do that.

And then I started to hear it more often, people saying, well, I like to play tennis. But I won’t play tennis because people will be looking at me if I were a little short skirt. Or even in other sports like soccer or basketball, I don’t want to run up and down the field and have people looking at my body.

And I thought initially, this was a thing that made sense at this weight loss camp. But when I came home and I decided to do a master’s degree, I started to notice it very commonly. Other people who I wouldn’t think of as having a weight issue still felt uncomfortable about their body.

And I think part of the reason that I really wanted to do a master’s degree was because, as a professional, I looked for information about how to improve our camp, how to make it better, how to address these body image issues in the setting. And I couldn’t find the information that I wanted. I didn’t feel like there was enough in terms of understanding of management of camps and sport facilities and so on. I didn’t feel like there was enough information about addressing body image issues specifically.

So that’s why I decided I was going to go back to school and study this. And I thought I was going to go back to school and study it so that I could come back to the camp and do a better job. But I kind of got hooked on the whole research thing and it went from there.

VINCE LARA: So you never really wanted to teach or anything. But the research part of it kind of sucked you in, I guess.

TONI LIECHTY: Especially in terms of how I viewed that it could make a difference in the professional world and how it could help to sort of make people’s lives better in a very noticeable way or direct way.

VINCE LARA: You know, some of your research looks at why people get into fitness programs and what keeps them there. And I’m interested, what led to that line of research?

TONI LIECHTY: Well, so when I started looking at body image, there’s a lot of research that says that people start out– that having a poor body image might encourage someone to start a fitness program. But it generally doesn’t lead to long term participation. Because if your motivation is just to look good and you start doing something physically active, it’s very unlikely you’re going to see results immediately. And if your only motivation was to see a physical result in terms of your appearance, then that result doesn’t happen so you stop doing the activity.

So I wanted to start to understand what else encourages people to be active, how can we get away from just the appearance factor, help to address different types of motivations that will keep people participating longer.

There’s also a lot of research saying that body image doesn’t lead to the most healthy behaviors. So if I’m trying to lose weight because of the way I look, I’m more likely to do sort of unhealthy dieting, excessive exercise, things that are going to just be focused on the way that I look.

Whereas if I’m motivated by my general health, I want to feel good, I want to interact with my friends, I want to get outdoors, things like that, I’m more likely to engage in healthy behaviors. So the idea is trying to shift people’s motivation and their reasons for physical activity away from the appearance focus and toward other types of things.

VINCE LARA: I’m curious if you ever are asked to consult with, let’s say, Planet Fitness or any of these other sorts of chains that pop up.

TONI LIECHTY: There’s a tension there.

VINCE LARA: OK.

TONI LIECHTY: Because I think there’s sort of an old fashioned thinking that if we can make people feel bad about the way they look, it will motivate them to be active.

VINCE LARA: Interesting.

TONI LIECHTY: And that’s the old school marketing approach, right? If you tell people, oh, you gained weight over the holidays. Don’t you want to lose that weight so that you can look good in a bikini in the summer, that it will encourage people to join your gym. But what we know from the research is that if people join the gym or whatever because of body shaming, then they do not continue to participate. So the difficulty in getting people to accept what the research says as opposed to what may seem a little bit more logical to them.

VINCE LARA: You know, one of your studies looks at barriers to physical activity. And what are some of those barriers and how do you go about trying to combat them?

TONI LIECHTY: I mean, the first barrier I was interested in was just the body image in general, being sort of self-conscious about the way you look. I think for a lot of people– So one of the things that people will report most commonly is that their barrier is time. They’ll say, well, I don’t have time to do it. Yet we know from research that people have time to do a whole lot of other things, right? They have time. Everybody has 24 hours in a day.

So it’s not necessarily how much time you have, but how you choose to allocate your time and what things you prioritize. A lot of people don’t prioritize physical activity because it’s not as easy or enjoyable as pulling out your phone and surfing on social media or doing something that’s more fun.

So one of the barriers, and is going to sound silly, but is just the fact that exercise is not fun for a lot of people. And I am not– I think a lot of people get into studying physical activity because they’re fitness gurus. But I am not a fitness guru. I don’t like going to the gym. I don’t like running. I don’t like working out in the traditional sense.

VINCE LARA: Sure.

TONI LIECHTY: But I like playing tennis. I like hiking. I like doing a lot of things that are active if they have something else that makes them enjoyable. And so for me, well, we also know in terms of research that there is a certain percentage of the population that would probably be active no matter what. They enjoy being active. But that’s a relatively small proportion. And most people, the majority of us don’t particularly like being physically active.

So I’m trying to help figure out how we can make physical activity more fun, more enjoyable, and more of a priority for people. If they have a barrier of just the inertia of getting started, if they view physical activity as a chore, if they think of it as something negative, if they don’t have anyone to participate with, that’s going to be more boring than if they want to do something that’s social.

And then there are a lot of barriers that people face just in their community. They face just the cost. We even hear people say that they don’t go to an activity that’s relatively low cost even if it’s only a couple of dollars. If their income is very low, that couple of dollars on a regular basis is not something they can afford.

Being in their local neighborhood, a lot of people are not willing or able to travel a long distance to work out at a gym or to hike in a park or something like that. So it needs to be relatively accessible to help people overcome that inertia of getting out and doing something active.

VINCE LARA: So what do you try to do to combat those things? Is there a movement that you– do reach out to, let’s say, a local park or community or something like that?

TONI LIECHTY: One of the things that we’ve been doing– So, I’m particularly interested in different life stages. And one group of people that are particularly inactive are older adults. And so, we’ve been working a little bit with Aurora Park District to find out what they do to help get people more active and what they do that is successful and is less successful.

And some of the things that they’ve been doing, one thing that they do is they have a punch card system so that people can buy a punch card. And every time they go to a class, they just take one punch. And that makes it so that they’re not paying for a whole class if they know that they’re not going be able to come every time. It makes it more cost effective. It also makes it feel less overwhelming to pay, say, a large amount of money for a session if they can’t afford it all at once.

And they make the classes fun. They make sure that there’s variety from class to class. They have fun music. They do fun moves during the act during the process. They encourage social interaction so that you come out come out and you hang out with your friends and you all laugh together and have a good time together. And it may sound silly, but fun is a pretty enticing element of any kind of leisure activity. So specifically for physical activity, which is not viewed as being very fun, if you can make it fun, that’s going to get people coming back.

VINCE LARA: You talked about looking at specific segments of people. So one specific segment you look at is women who play tackle football, really interesting. How did you get involved with that?

TONI LIECHTY: So I actually knew someone. She was a mature student who had come back to school. And she took a class from me and I was talking a little bit about body image. And she came up to me after class and said, this really resonated with me because I’ve always had a poor body image because I’ve always been really big. And I wanted to do things like figure skating. This was when I lived in Canada and figure skating’s very popular.

She said, but I never felt that I could do figure skating because I don’t have a body for it. And as an adult, I started playing tackle football and I realized that suddenly, instead of being a negative thing, my size was a positive thing. People appreciated, they wanted me on their team because I was big. So I thought, that’s such a unique setting. That’s such a unique sport that celebrates a bigger body, which is very uncommon for women.

You know, I used to do gymnastics or I played basketball or softball or tennis, different sports that have a sort of body that’s an ideal. And when I started talking to these women on the team, they said, what’s awesome about football for women specifically is that we can be any size that we are, whatever our body is now, and there will be a position that suits us. So instead of me trying to make my body be the way that the sport requires, I have the body that I have and I just find a position on the team that suits the way that my body is. And that makes a big difference in terms of the way I view my body and appreciate what my body can do instead of how my body looks.

VINCE LARA: Interesting. That’s a league in Canada for women who play tackle football?

TONI LIECHTY: Yeah. And there are leagues in the US, too. They’re just not as well-known.

VINCE LARA: Really interesting. You know, Illinois is an R1 university. So research projects are your bailiwick, right. And typically, there’s always a lot in your pipeline. So what have you got going on that you’re really excited about that you’re ready to talk about? It’s at that stage that you’re ready to talk about?

TONI LIECHTY: I think the thing that I’m kind of focusing on right now is a study I’m doing on roller derby. A colleague of mine out of Eastern Illinois University had kind of an in with some local roller derby leagues. And we did, actually, a photo voice approach where we asked the participants to take photographs of what roller derby means to them.

And they took photos of themselves doing derby. They took photos of their outfits. They took photos of their team, their family, and so on. And we interviewed them asking, why did you take these photos? Tell us about your experiences with roller derby.

And in some ways, there were some similarities to the football study in that they said, it’s a really cool sort of empowering sport that celebrates your body instead of telling you to fight your body and make it a certain way. That sense of celebrating your body as it is also encourages you to keep participating because there’s not a constant frustration that my body’s not correct, quote unquote, for this sport.

They also talked a lot about the social aspect and how they felt a lot of social support with the team, which kept them coming back. And a lot of people talked about how participating in that sport in that moment served a really valuable need for them. Like maybe they were going through a divorce or dealing with a health issue or something like that. They found this team and this sport and they were able to enjoy doing something physically active. They felt strong and empowered. They had this social network. So it really filled a lot of needs in their life.

And again, I think that’s one thing that we sometimes miss out on about physical activity. A lot of times, if you’re thinking, OK, I have 30 minutes in the day or a couple of hours in the day. If I can just only get physical activity out of it, that might not be a good enough use of my time. But if I can get physical activity. I can also get fun. I can also develop friendships. I can also develop connections in the community and all these different things, then that’s much a better use of my time, more efficient use of my time.

I don’t know that they all said it in those exact words. But a lot of them just talk about getting multiple benefits from participating in a given sport. And that’s another way that I think we can help promote ongoing activity and physical activity, or ongoing participation in physical activity.

VINCE LARA: My thanks to Dr. Liechty. For more podcasts on Illinois College of Applied Health Sciences, search A Few Minutes With on iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Radio.com, and other places you get your podcast fix. Thanks for listening and see you next time.

Tags: A Few Minutes With, Podcast, Toni Liechty

Podcast: A Few Minutes With … David Strauser

March 03, 2020 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

Vince Lara, media relations specialist at the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois, speaks with David Strauser, professor of Kinesiology and Community Health at Illinois, about Dr. Strauser’s research on work personality and vocational behavior with a focus on people with chronic health conditions and disabilities.

Transcript

VINCE LARA: Hi, and welcome to another edition of A Few Minutes With, the podcast that showcases Illinois College of Applied Health Sciences. I’m Vince Lara, and today I’ll speak to Dr. David Strauser of our Kinesiology and Community Health Department about his research on work personality and vocational behavior with a focus on people with chronic health conditions and disability.

All right. Speaking with Dr. David Strauser. Dr. Strauser, I appreciate you taking the time to come on with our podcast. The first question I ask when I meet with faculty is I’m interested– I do my prep as any journalist would, and I try to find out– hmm, I wonder what led this person to our fine institution? Your background is at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is where you got your degrees. So I wonder what led you to Illinois.

DAVID STRAUSER: That’s a good question. There’s probably a variety of things that led me to the University of Illinois. I came to the University of Illinois from the University of Memphis where I spent 10 years. And that was the first job that I got after completing my PhD at the University Wisconsin-Madison. Down there, I started a research center, had about 30 people working for me. We were doing a lot of work across the state of Tennessee in the southeast.

And then this opportunity came available at the University of Illinois. And I think for a combination of probably family reasons, being a native Midwesterner, and also an opportunity to be at a school like Illinois, it just seemed like a nice opportune time to make that switch from the University of Memphis to the University of Illinois. And a chance to be in a Big Ten school, at a big research school just seemed like a hard opportunity to turn down.

Also, I think Illinois is a little bit unusual compared to other programs in the Big Ten that have my area of study that it focused a little bit more on health and health behavior. And so that was something that maybe initially didn’t come into the mix but became a point of what I really appreciated over the course of my time here.

VINCE LARA: Are you from the Midwest originally?

DAVID STRAUSER: I’m from Madison, Wisconsin originally.

VINCE LARA: That makes sense. I know research is a big part of this job, obviously. But did you always want to teach? Was that something that was top of mind, or was it the research first for you?

DAVID STRAUSER:: That’s a really good question. And I would say it’s probably teaching first, research second. I started out as an undergraduate thinking that I would go on and do– as an athlete, I was going to go on and do coaching of some kind. So I think that was always kind of my focus as an undergraduate.

And I had some very influential faculty people who pulled me aside and said, hey, what about me be doing this? What about looking at this opportunity? And that started to peak my interest enough to go look into it a little bit deeper. After completing my undergraduate, I was out in the private sector for about a year or so and decided, you know, this is good, but really being affiliated with the university and pursuing that academic work would really be something that I’d want to do as a career.

With that then became the teaching, and then the research developed through my work as a doctoral student to really look at their research. But I was very much trained from faculty at UW Madison who trained me as a professor. So when we talk about a professor, in my opinion, it’s the research, teaching, and service together. It’s not just one aspect of it. So that relates to your first question about being in Illinois. I think Illinois gives me an opportunity to do all three of those core components of being a professor, and that’s teaching, research, and service.

VINCE LARA: Focusing on that research part, now, your research, to an extent, focuses on work, health, and well-being. And I’m wondering, commonly with researchers, there’s something that inspired them to look at that. And I was wondering if there’s anything that inspired you to look at those research lines.

DAVID STRAUSER:: Yeah, that’s an interesting story probably as a reflecting back on it. Again, as I was an athlete in college and struggled with injuries in college, it became losing the opportunity to compete in college because of injuries. I guess that was happening at the same time that I had some of these influential faculty in my year talking about, hey, what about pursuing rehabilitation psychology as a career? What about some of those things? So I guess serendipity of those things coming together.

That extended then to probably my first job, as I mentioned, before I went back to graduate school, and that was working with injured workers in Southern California. And through that and my own experience of injury and then working with industrial injured workers solidified my interest into working with people with disabilities as a whole and working with people who are having problems working– pursuing their careers because they have an injury or illness.

VINCE LARA: Yeah. You get some of your research was in marginalized workers. Could you talk a bit about that?

DAVID STRAUSER: Yeah, I think that’s a pretty big term, marginalized workers, in that it’s a good word. It’s an encompassing word. I look at– especially right now, for probably about the last 15 years, I’ve really looked at young adults who are having a hard time entering the labor market for some reason related to a chronic health condition, whether that’s cancer– I do a large group of that. Could be some mental health issues, autism.

So they’ve been marginalized because they have a chronic health condition. We have a project right now where we’re looking at foster care youth, formerly incarcerated or justice involved youth. So you’re correct to save my work has always looked at people who’ve been marginalized from entry or participation in the labor market, usually because of some chronic health condition or combination thereof.

So my research has focused a lot on undergraduate– or I mean younger adults in terms of their entrance in the labor market. Probably an advocacy side of me has continued to deal with industrial injured workers– I’ll use that term– people who’ve been injured on the job and advocating for their overall well-being and helping them manage and deal with their loss. So that’s probably more of an outreach service component of it than it is a research part, where my research is primarily focusing on these young adults’ entrance into the labor market.

VINCE LARA: So what particularly do you deal with? Is it trying to overcome the stigma of what these workers have dealt with?

DAVID STRAUSER: Most people who have chronic health conditions are likely to experience difficulty in meeting the demands of working how it’s typically performed. So they’re having some issue with meeting the job requirements or figuring out how they identify with the labor market. They may– for example, somebody might have an interest in doing something as a career, but because they have a limitation or a functional impairment, can’t pursue that, so that causes a lot of stress. So I deal with that.

There also is just a lot of people right now and a lot that we more to learn about mental health that they’re having a lot of mental health issues that are impacting their ability to function on the job and meet the demands on the job. So they might get a job but they can’t keep a job. And so after a period of time, they start to develop that resume that looks very scattered, very thin in terms of duration on the job. And that becomes then stigmatizing and marginalized.

So stigma is an issue, obviously, that everybody deals with with chronic health conditions. That is something I deal with, but I’m more interested in how they fit to the environment, how do they see themselves fitting as a worker, and how did they develop their identity as a worker.

VINCE LARA: Has your research ever led to you being a consultant for either a company or perhaps an industry looking to help these marginalized workers get back in?

DAVID STRAUSER: I do a lot of work with a group called Children’s Brain Tumor Foundation, where I work a lot with them to help young adult cancer survivors and businesses help understand issues related to cancer survivors, try to help that fit. So yes, I’ve worked with some non-profits and some NGOs to work with them to understand, develop plans, develop programs to help them address these issues.

VINCE LARA: You developed what’s called the Illinois Work and Well-being Model. I’m interested about that. Tell me a little bit what that is.

DAVID STRAUSER: Yeah, the Illinois Work and Well-Being Model is kind of a byproduct of my 30 years of in this field of how I was thinking about career stuff and finally came together for me as a model, where in our field, in the health field, we use a lot of the International Classification of Functioning or the ICF. So I use components of the ICF and then Common Career Development domains and mesh those two together.

And the model really tries to explain about how people’s functioning and how their personal environmental factors impact how they function and how their functioning impacts the career domains of how people become aware of what they are in terms of what they want to do, their vocational identity, how they go about acquiring jobs, and how they go about maintaining jobs.

And so that model helps provide a framework for research, and it’s guided a lot of my research over my whole career. Probably the last four or five years it’s been formalized as a model that we’re using to guide our research, to help us identify factors and variables. But also, we’ve been using it quite a bit with practitioners to help them guide their services to identify where interventions might need to be placed, where are points of intervention.

So as an example, if we’re having a person, a young adult cancer survivor who has a brain tumor, they’re trying to figure out, where do I fit into the world of work? What am I going to do? How am I going to do it? We might want to look at their functioning. What are the residual factors of their brain tumor? How do they function in terms of physically, cognitively, emotionally? And how do they communicate? And look at that.

However, even though as we look at those factors or those components, we also understand that personal factors, psychological factors such as resilience, hope, self-efficacy, impact how they perceive their functioning. In addition, environmental factors– ethnicity, social class. I say ethnicity. Ethnicity is a personal factor, but their cultural background. Their social factors, their schooling, their family also impact how they perceive their functioning.

So we want to make sure that we’re looking at all those factors and then how do they relate over to the career domain and those three factors I talked about in terms of awareness. We call it awareness. Basically, vocational identity. Acquisition and maintenance.

VINCE LARA: You always have research going on, several projects in the pipeline. That’s one of the things you have to do.

DAVID STRAUSER: Right.

VINCE LARA: What are some of the ones that you have that you’re excited about, that can talk about, say?

DAVID STRAUSER: Yeah. We actually have a lot of good stuff going on right now, and I’m very excited about it. We’re at a good time. We’re having a lot of data and a lot of projects. So we are right now– a couple things. In terms of the cancer group, we have several data sets right now, one with Dana Farber, one with Children’s Brain Tumor Foundation, where we’re looking at these psychological career factors that impact employment and employment outcomes with a group of brain tumor survivors.

What’s really exciting about that, and this might– compared to people in other areas like epidemiology or even breast cancer, our data set combined right now is we have about 300 brain tumor survivors. That’s quite a good number for brain tumor survivors. So it’s a hard group to get. So we have some data there that we’re starting to analyze and look at working with these Dana Farber and Children’s Brain Tumor Foundation that look at what are these factors that impact employment outcomes.

And we’re very excited about that. We have several papers submitted right now. They’re under review. A couple of papers that have been accepted that are looking at using the Illinois Model, as we talked about, looking at how functioning and perception of functioning impacts the different domains of career. Highlight to that would be we’re starting to get good evidence to suggest that how people’s emotional function, the perceptions of their emotional functioning, really impact a lot of their identity development, contributes some to the acquisition phase.

Conversely, we know that people now who start to– how they perceive themselves physically really has a lot to do with how they perceive their ability to maintain a job. So what we can start to do there is start to parse out of, where people are in their career development, what our interventions need to target and what areas of functioning do we need to maybe support or address to maximize outcomes? So that’s very exciting with that.

Another population that we’re starting to look at or another group that we’re working with is, as I mentioned, a broader group of people with disabilities looking at developing some instruments related to the Illinois Work and Well-Being Model. We have a couple of instruments being developed right now to measure some of those constructs within the model, so we’re very excited about that. That’s not as maybe exciting, but for us, that’s a very practical piece.

Another area that we’re really starting to get into because we have seen it quite a bit with the young adults in foster care and the formerly incarcerated young adults is the issue of trauma and how trauma is impacting them, but how trauma is impacting their perceptions of their career development and their career development opportunities. And not surprisingly, we’re finding again there’s quite a bit of an impact there in terms of how much trauma, how they’re experiencing that trauma, how they feel about that trauma, how close to the surface, so to speak, that trauma is is going to be impacting a lot of how they see themselves as a worker, their identity, and their motivation to pursue those things.

VINCE LARA: My thanks to David Strauser. For more podcasts on Illinois’ College of Applied Health Sciences, search A Few Minutes With on iTunes, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Stitcher, and other places you get your podcasts fix. Thanks for listening, and see you next time.

Tags: David Strauser, Podcast

A Few Minutes With … Bill Stewart

Feb. 12, 2020 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

AHS media relations specialist Vince Lara speaks with Bill Stewart, a professor in the department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism, to discuss Stewart’s research on the development of parks and conservation areas to enhance a public sense of place and promote environmental awareness.

Listen to the podcast

Transcript

VINCE LARA: This is Vince Lara in the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois. Today I spent a few minutes with Bill Stewart, professor in the Department of Recreation, Sport, and Tourism to discuss his research on the development of parks and conservation areas to enhance a public sense of place and promote environmental awareness.

And, Bill, I like to ask all the faculty when I meet with them this question. And that, is what inspires your research?

BILL STEWART:Yeah. Well, Vince, thank you for inviting me to be at this podcast. It’s really great to be here and to talk with you about this.

VINCE LARA: You bet.

BILL STEWART:What inspires my research? There’s a handful of things that do that. When I was a child, I was born and raised in Michigan. And my family was very much an outdoor enthusiast family. So I went to a lot of parks. I liked all four seasons. Winter activities, springtime romps, and summertime camping and swimming. I’ve always enjoyed being out in nature. And so that sort laid a foundation.

I went to my various programming. I had a previous life before I was an academic, and that previous life took on a couple of different job changes. I spent two years working for an oil company, and as a marketing technologist in a chemical and petroleum additives division. And that was really interesting to get a view of what life was like from the business side of an oil industry. I realized that there were some things that bothered me about the imprint that oil industry left on the environment, and I knew that they’re working hard at trying to reduce waste and pollution. But I thought it’d be better to maybe get more information about what I need to work for an oil company, or any sort of business to help with the environment.

And then I went back to school for my MBA at the University of Chicago. And I went to work for a consulting company, a worldwide consulting company. And I was in their construction engineering systems division. And I went around to a lot– I thought it’d be great to be a consultant where I help people with what they need to do.

And I found myself working for a company that built large petrochemical refinery plants in various places. I read some of their cultural impact statements and their environmental impact statements. And I thought to myself that there’s so much more to valuing nature than simply how many natives to move from one place to another, or how flat they need to make the earth to put the cement slab on to make it a refinery.

And so I went back to school at University of Arizona and the School of Natural Resources for another master’s and a PhD. Looking largely at forestry and watershed management, but I cared not so much about technical aspects of that. But I cared about how communities and individuals relate to development of natural resources. And that’s led me on this journey that I’ve been doing now for, gosh, 35 years or more. Where I really like to understand what other people think about nature, about why they value the places that they do, what some of their meanings are, and appreciate ways in which they connect with the natural environment.

VINCE LARA: You got your undergrad at Illinois, correct?

BILL STEWART:Yeah, I came here from undergraduate. I was in chemistry here. And I love learning about chemistry. It was just a fabulous undergraduate experience for me. And so it’s sort of need to come back to my alma mater to teach and do research.

VINCE LARA: What led you to academia? Because, like you said, you had this career before teaching. So, what was the path here?

BILL STEWART:Yeah. Good question, Vince. I can tell you’re good at this. What led me to an academic was that I’ve always liked reading and writing. And I came to find out during, let’s say my previous life, that I liked reading and writing what I want to read and write about. And I thought that an academic– although I clearly have some large public values that I work under at University of Illinois, I care about community well-being, public health, sustainability. Those are large questions that drive my research. But I could choose ways in which I implement those strategies through my teaching and scholarship.

And I found that the life of the academic to be one where I could be very productive, and I could blur the lines between my work and my let’s just say non-work time. I really like doing what I do. And one of the interesting things is when people ask me if I’m going to work this weekend– friends of mine in the community– I have to pause a bit. Because I’ve always, I guess, worked on the weekend. I just like to read and write about things that I care about in my teaching and research.

VINCE LARA: Interesting. So, your research involves conservation planning. Can you talk a little bit about that?

BILL STEWART:Yeah conservation planning, it’s a really huge concept. And my window into conservation planning has to do with bringing in stakeholders. Stakeholders are those people who are affected by or can affect environmental decision making. Often of a public need nature, like building a park, or developing a wetland, restoring a prairie. Those would be examples of environmental park development projects.

And for me, conservation planning is about working with communities to, at least in the Midwest here, to look at this corn or bean field on the outskirts of town that’s going to be a new development, and ask themselves to imagine what would that be like as a park. So they see it as a current cornfield, and they’re are wondering how to imagine what they need to be when they make that into some subdivisions and divide that up.

And to some extent it’s about land use planning, but to another extent it’s also about adding value to people’s lives. Each town has their unique heritage and their sense of identity on a landscape. And it’s fun to work with communities to understand what their own sense of history is about. And often, parks tend to be emblematic of those kinds of values that people have had historically in any given area their relationship with the locale.

For example, I think of Urbana and Champaign. They’re supposedly twin cities in ways that were clearly fraternal twins. You’ve got Urbana, whose parks are largely natural areas. They have this relationship with nature that says, nature should be restored and sort of untouched by humans. That the best kind of nature, the idealized park, is an environment where people are there to visit. And we’ve restored sort of a pristine nature, to some extent. Champaign parks are very different. Champaign parks have more of, I want to say, a progressive narrative of humans and nature. Where humans play a role of gardening, and they make them beautiful, and they’re meant for places for people to walk and have activities.

So although that they still have some very similar amenities, Urbana Park District has more natural areas. Champaign Park District has more cultural areas. And they’re very different views of what each town is like.

VINCE LARA: Interesting. Are we getting better at quantifying what a park means to an area? Whether it’s economically, or in non-tangible ways, are we getting better about understanding what green space means?

BILL STEWART:Yeah, that’s a great question there. I think of the notion of, what does any sort of environment mean as being one of place? The concept of place and place making really underscores a lot of my research. A sense of place is a uniqueness of a meaning that people feel as attachment to an environment. And their sense of place at a personal level where you might think about your grandmother’s pasture, and the personal relationship you have with that pasture, or your grandmother’s backyard.

When I think about community sense of place, is there something collective about the community that makes its relationship with its local environments unique to that locale? And so, your question is, are we getting better at quantifying that? Just to step back from that, I’d like to think we’re getting better understanding those relationships. Those relationships come in many kinds, as you mentioned. There’s the economic valuation, there is a personal valuation, there’s sociological, there’s emotional, there’s spirituality. There’s all sorts of ways in which we connect with environments.

And I’m going to say that we’re just tapping the surface of the iceberg in understanding ways that people and communities have come to identify and care about their environments. And that kind of research is urgently needed. We’ve got, at least when I was first born back in 1955– I’m dating myself here– there is 2.5 billion people on the Earth. Right now I think we’ve got 7.5 billion people on the Earth. So in my lifetime alone– I’m 65 this year– the Earth’s population has tripled. And in that time period there’s been– I’ve never noticed any one year the increase in people. But across my lifespan I’ve noticed there is coming to be a scarcity of wild lands, of open space, of wetlands, of spots that you could go out and enjoy nature.

And so I think that the more information we have about how people connect with an environment, I think the better off we’ll be as a society. Because we need to know that those empty spaces, supposedly that really are out of production, in fact are really valuable to people.

VINCE LARA: Now, you direct the Park and Environmental Behavior Research Lab. And as a researcher, you always have projects going on. Are there any that you have going on currently that you’re– you’re excited about all of them, I’m sure. But are there any that you want to talk about that are top of mind for you?

BILL STEWART:Yeah. You’re right on that. I’ve got the neatest group of graduate students and research projects that I’m currently doing. And they’ve added a lot of value to my life and my students’ lives. I guess there’s two that come to mind.

One has to do with the evaluation Chicago’s large lot program. As you may know, there’s an urban vacancy problem across most of the world’s cities. And it’s particularly acute in the northern tier of this country, through the Rust Belt, I’m going to say. Where people have moved out of the city and urban areas for various reasons. Often they abandon their house, and they abandon their house. At times, a city will come in and fold the house into its foundation, or just haul it off. And so this left with what was once a thriving neighborhood in an urban area has become a lot of empty lots there.

Just to give you some examples of this, Philadelphia has about 40,000 vacant lots. Buffalo has about 15 vacant lots. Cleveland about 25,000. Detroit has 125,000 vacant lots to the tune of 25 square miles in Detroit. Chicago has about 35,000 vacant lots. And I will say that these vacant lots are not evenly distributed around the city. They happen only in certain neighborhoods. And what Chicago has done, which is very innovative and quite bold, they developed this green healthy neighborhood plan in 2012. And a cornerstone of that plan to sell off these vacant lots to someone that owned property on the block for $1. And so for $1, if you own property on the block, you could purchase let’s say in the vacant lot next to you and do whatever you wanted to with it.

And so I’m evaluating the social and environmental impacts of that large lot policy. And, it’s good news. We found that it connects people to their sense of place, it connects people to their neighbors, which their neighbors help them further garden their spot, and they help to pick up debris. They’ve come to know their neighbors in a tighter fashion that creates this sense of place that was much stronger than what it used to be. Where the lights used to have a past, because it wasn’t– people would look out on the block and say, wow, that’s where so-and-so used to live, that’s what this other family used to live. And now they see empty lots. So it sort of was a lot with a past and not a future.

Now with this large lot policy, these lots have been bought up, now have a future for them. And so these neighborhoods, the people who stayed behind, they care deeply about their neighborhoods. They stayed behind not because they’re desperate. But because of family or community reasons, they decided to stay and slug it out through the hard times. And now they’re finally getting rewarded if they own property. They can, if they want to, purchase that lot and create a new vision of what that block could be by repurposing a once vacant lot.

VINCE LARA: Now, you’re obviously excited about the large lot research that you’re doing. Is there other research– and I like to call these moonshot projects, because they’re kind of off into the distance. They might not be attainable currently. But are there things that, given the resources and the time and the amount of graduate research assistants you need, that you think about? That you write down, you scribble on a piece of paper maybe at 3:00 in the morning and you’re like, oh, I wish I had the time to do this.

BILL STEWART:Yeah, that’s a really good question. So, I should step back just a minute and say that my research all revolves around a concept called place making. Where people, families, communities, individuals, they aspire to make their place something different and better than what it currently is. And that’s where the large lot project comes in. It’s about place making in an urban environment.

I guess I would continue on that line, as long as we’re talking about the large lot project, there is another moonshot project that deals with more of an urban ecological nature. Where I really have partnered with my colleagues Carena van Riper in Department of Natural Resource and Environmental Sciences, Paul Gobster, who is a landscape architect with the Forest Service. And Alessandro Rigolon, who’s a planner now with the University of Utah. That’s the large lot team.

There’s another forthcoming possibility, and I hope we get the invitation through the National Science Foundation, to invite us to submit a full blown proposal for what’s called a leader project, or long term ecological change for urban areas. And that’s largely working with ecologists out of Chicago that are based in various universities up there. And they’re looking for ways to couple social issues along with ecological issues. No longer can we study the ecology of a system and not be concerned about what– let’s include people in this ecological understanding.

So, I think it’d be really a neat challenge for myself and my students to do a more stronger coupling of healing communities with ecological communities, and try to understand just a baseline description of what is the nature of that relationship. And to some extent, are there interventions that can happen through policy triggers that the city can do– much like the large lot program– to further facilitate a healthy social ecological resilience? To make human communities more ready to respond to changes in their future.

VINCE LARA: My thanks to Bill Stewart. To hear more about Illinois and the College of Applied Health Sciences, find our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and iHeartRadio by searching a few minutes. See you next time.

Tags: A Few Minutes With, Bill Stewart, Department of Recreation Sport and Tourism, Podcast

A Few Minutes With … Pasquale Bottalico

Dec. 17, 2018 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

*Pasquale Bottalico’s research looks at noisy environments, such as restaurants. (Google Images)*

In this edition of “Five Minutes With …,” AHS media relations specialist Vince Lara-Cinisomo interviews Dr. Pasquale Bottalico in the department of Speech and Hearing Science about his study of the effects of ambient noise in restaurants.

Bottalico, in his study, “Lombard effect, ambient noise and willingness to spend time and money in a restaurant,” published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, found that subjects reported a disturbance of their speech when noise reached 52.2 A-weighted decibels (dBA) and that vocal effort began to increase at 57.3 dBA. The sound level of speech increased as ambient noise increased. As background noise increased, it triggered a decrease in the willingness to spend time and money in that establishment. You can read more about Dr. Bottalico’s research here.

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Transcript

VINCE LARA-CINISOMO: Hello, this is Vince Lara, Media Relations Specialist at the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois. Today I spend five minutes with Dr. Pasquale Bottalico, of the Department of Speech And Hearing Science, to talk about his recent study on ambient noise in restaurants and its effect on the bottom line.

PASQUALE BOTTALICO: So the goal of the restaurant, the idea of the restaurant, is what we can do to improve the situation in restaurant. So my study was actually started because there was a lack in the literature. And I’m always being interested, it’s not the first paper that I worked about Lombard effect. I’m very interested in Lombard effect.

And I started to be interested in Lombard effect, again, starting from classroom acoustics, because the Lombard effect is basically characterized by a rate of voice increase per dB increasing noise in the environment. And the value is 72 for teachers, which is the highest. Generally, in the literature, it’s reported between 0.3 and 0.6. But teacher, 0.72., so they’re increasing their voice even higher.

VINCE LARA-CINISOMO: Every day?

PASQUALE BOTTALICO: Every day, for every dB of noise increasing in the classroom. So this means that restaurant noise– everyone went to a restaurant in his life, and it can happen that after dinner with some people, at a restaurant, you go out and your throat’s sore. And you don’t really understand why. And because the Lombard effect is an unconscious effect, so you are not conscious of the fact that you are actually screaming.

But your voice, your body, and your physiology knows that. And so you will have the effect that your throat is burning. And I found particular the fact that this effect was never studied in a restaurant. And there were not studies correlating it with the willingness to spend money. So I thought it was a good idea to do the study. And I already did similar study for understanding other aspects of the Lombard effect. I was quizzing in the past about at which level of noise it starts, these effects, in other papers.

So I use a similar protocol, but I changed the setting, and it changed the noise. So I tried to recreate a restaurant in one of our sound booths. I had my students, my undergraduate students, that were the partner in the dinner. And we used typical restaurant noise, and we changed the level in a random way, covering a very large interval of noise, so from a medium level to a very loud level. Again, using the range of noise level reported by the literature, in restaurant noise.

And what it came out, that a level between 50 and 55 dB is starting this willingness to leave that place, and also to spend less money to eat in that place, and is starting the disturbance in the communication. And because of that, there is the objective evaluation of the voice, that is starting to increase at about 60 dB of noise. And all of these effects were quite strong.

We are starting to work again on the project. After the forum actually, because I kind of figured out that in this case, we used college students for this study, and I’m considering it like a pilot. But I want to move forward with the elder population.

And so, we know also that we have child in our college that’s interested in new research on aging people. And we have a movement, that is the age friendly in Urbana-Champaign, to make the city more friendly for aging people. And I think that this project will fit perfectly.

So I have a doctoral student in audiology. She’s going to start to collect data next semester. And the goal will be to create a different group in the elder population, normal hearing, and people with a moderate hearing loss, and people with a severe hearing loss. And try to understand better how these vulnerable populations are affected by the problem.

VINCE LARA-CINISOMO: My thanks again to Dr. Bottalico. This has been Five Minutes With.

Tags: A Few Minutes With, Pasquale Bottalico, Podcast

Podcast: A Few Minutes With … Brandon Peters

Jan. 06, 2020 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

*Brandon Peters (Photo courtesy of Division of Intercollegiate Athletics)*

Vince Lara of the College of Applied Health Sciences speaks with Illinois starting quarterback Brandon Peters, a graduate student in the Recreation, Sport and Tourism department of AHS.

Peters, who got his undergraduate degree at Michigan before transferring to Illinois, talks about why he picked RST and what he enjoys about the classes.

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Transcript

VINCE LARA: This is Vince Lara at the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois. Today, I speak with Brandon Peters, starting quarterback for the Illinois football team, and RST grad student.

I’m talking with Brandon Peters, who’s the starting quarterback for the Illinois football team. So Brandon, how much did graduate programs– in terms of deciding where you wanted to continue playing– how much did the academics part of it, and how much, honestly, did the football playing part it have a play in your decision?

BRANDON PETERS: I would say football was the main focus for me. But, you know, when I came on my official visit, they kind of laid out the academic plan for me. And, you know, kind of weighing my options. Illinois being the university that it is, they offered the RST program for me to be in, and sport management was always something I was interested in at Michigan. And I just thought it was a great opportunity to come to Illinois, also at the academic level.

VINCE LARA: Now, you’re taking some online courses, what I had read. But you’re on campus obviously a lot. Have you run into any of your professors? Or have you had a chance to interact with any of them?BRANDON PETERS: Not yet, but I’m going to set up a meeting with the RST– I forget. Tiger?

VINCE LARA: Mm-hmm.

BRANDON PETERS: (Prof.) Tiger. Yeah. I’m going to set up a meeting with him, and just get to know him a little bit, and talk to him.

VINCE LARA: Now obviously, football’s the goal. Right? Ultimately, whether it’s the NFL, CFL, XFL, or whatever it is. But if that doesn’t happen, or even thinking post-football, do you have any ideas? Like, maybe RST hopes? You know, like you can work as a GM, or you can work in– you’re doing sport management as your focus, right? So what have you thought about post-football?

BRANDON PETERS: I really haven’t thought much into it yet. I still have another year to play. When it gets to that time, I think I’m going to think at it in more depth. But like you said, I’ve always thought about staying in the sport world, since I’ve always been so close to it my whole life. I think this will definitely help me propel myself into the future when I get to that point.

VINCE LARA: You’re from Avon, Indiana.

BRANDON PETERS: Yeah.

VINCE LARA: So did the proximity of Illinois play a big factor in deciding to come here?

BRANDON PETERS: Yeah. I mean, the other school that I had a lot of interest in too was Miami, Ohio, which is even closer than Illinois. Being able to stay at home was a great opportunity for me. And then just to be even closer to my family, and they could come to even more games. You know, my elders, my grandma and grandpa can travel well to games. So you know, it’s nice to have that.

VINCE LARA: Definitely. One last question I have for you. What classes are you taking right now?

BRANDON PETERS: RST 515 and 512.

VINCE LARA: 512? What are those courses like?

BRANDON PETERS: Organization and marketing.

VINCE LARA: My thanks to Brandon Peters. This has been A Few Minutes With.

Tags: A Few Minutes With, Podcast

A Few Minutes With … Susannah Scaroni

Oct. 01, 2019 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

*Paralympic medalist Susannah Scaroni (Getty Images)*

College of Applied Health Sciences media relations specialist Vince Lara speaks with two-time Paralympian Susannah Scaroni, who is training at Illinois for the 2020 Games in Tokyo.

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Transcript

VINCE LARA: Hello, this is Vince Lara in the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois. Today I spend a few minutes with Susannah Scaroni, two-time Paralympian who’s looking for her third trip to the games in 2020 in Tokyo.

Well I’m speaking with Susannah Scaroni, who is a 2020 Paralympian hopeful, we’ll say–

SUSANNAH SCARONI: Yes.

VINCE LARA: –if that sounds right to you.

SUSANNAH SCARONI: Yes.

VINCE LARA: And you also competed in 2016 in Rio, so this will be your second games.

SUSANNAH SCARONI: Also 2012.

VINCE LARA: Wow, so this will be your third.

SUSANNAH SCARONI: Hopefully will be the third.

VINCE LARA: Hopefully it will be the third for you.

SUSANNAH SCARONI: Yeah.

VINCE LARA: Well, let’s talk about where you got your start in racing.

SUSANNAH SCARONI: Well, I grew up in a little tiny farming community in eastern Washington. And I was fortunate enough to be close to Spokane, Washington, just about an hour away. But there’s an adaptive sports program for youth there. So I learned about it through Shriners Hospital and immediately fell in love with it.

So I started out on the ParaSport Spokane team. And when you’re in that world of adaptive sports, you learn about the University of Illinois. They have been just such a powerhouse with wheelchair athletes for decades. So I applied to come here, and here I am. And I love it.

VINCE LARA: Yeah, that was going to be my next question is that you’re from the Pacific Northwest, and you ended up here. So obviously coach Bleakney’s reputation preceded him, and that was part of why you decided to come here.

SUSANNAH SCARONI: Absolutely. Yeah. So I went to school a couple years in Montana before I came here, just based on financial reasons. But the second year I was there, coach Adam, he gave me a call and was like, hey, I don’t know– are you still interested in coming?

Because we have this other funding opportunity now. And so I was. After even two years of training on my own and doing my own thing, I still loved racing. I had my racing chair out there with me and decided to transfer over in 2011.

VINCE LARA: That’s amazing. Now, we talked about you were in 2012 and 2016. So let’s say you’re one of the veterans on the team. Because a team, you have people as young as 19.

SUSANNAH SCARONI: Right, exactly.

VINCE LARA: So do your teammates come to you for advice, and is that mentor role something you like?

SUSANNAH SCARONI: Yes and yes, and especially more recently I’ve been realizing more and more that we have new waves of freshmen coming in, and I’m in my third year of grad school now. And just being able to be this wealth of knowledge for a whole host of reasons, whether it’s living independently at college, whether it’s navigating accessible areas on campus, or I’m really passionate about nutrition. So there are some questions about nutrition and training and not doing certain things downstairs, like being tiny. All of these experiences are things I love to share with the new athletes that come in.

VINCE LARA: Now, this being potentially your third, do you look ahead to 2024 already? Or are you saying to yourself, this might be my last one? Especially when you are in school.

SUSANNAH SCARONI: That’s a good segue into that question because I have thought about this. But one thing I also really love in my career is the role model aspect of it. So right now we’re at a really cool part of wheelchair marathon awareness because Abbott World Major Series has a wheelchair division now. And I can still foresee myself continuing to push that wave of women wheelchair racers while the next group gets up to that point.

But it kind of sort of depends on where that is. There’s a lot of women I race with that are all within the same age. And so I wouldn’t want us all to stop at one time, and then all that really hard work just kind of go down a little bit. So I might see how it goes, see where the rest of the world is and the rest of the US females, and keep racing. I’m also not entirely sure yet.

VINCE LARA: OK. Well, what are your plans– well you just talked a little bit about your plans. You’re training to become a registered dietitian here at Illinois.

SUSANNAH SCARONI: Yes.

VINCE LARA: And so what’s after sport?

SUSANNAH SCARONI: Yeah, well, that’s a great question. The way I sort of foresee my career goals, I would love to be a sports dietitian with US Paralympics. I think it’s great to– nutrition is a basic field. But when you can apply it and adapt it to para athletes, I think having been one will add a really nice element to the advice I can give in the future. So I want to just try it out and see what it’s like being a sports dietitian.

And I haven’t completely thrown out the possibility of continuing research. There’s a lot of things that need to be studied in para athletes still. So I’ve really enjoyed sports physiology as well as nutrition science in my grad school program so far. So I think I could see that being a possible future thing to do as well. Yeah.

VINCE LARA: My thanks to Susannah Scaroni. This has been A Few Minutes With.

Tags: A Few Minutes With, Podcast, Susannah Scaroni

A Few Minutes With … Alexa Halko

Jan. 6, 2020 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

2016 Paralympian Alexa Halko, training at Illinois for the 2020 Games in Tokyo, speaks with College of Applied Health Sciences media relations specialist Vince Lara-Cinisomo about Illinois’ Paralympic training site, the Disability Resources & Educational Services unit and her future plans.

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Transcript

VINCE LARA: Hello, this is Vince Lara in the communications office at the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois. Today I spend a few minutes with Alexa Halko, 2016 Paralympian training for the 2020 games here at Illinois.

All right. I’m with Alexa Halko, Paralympian. Alexa, now, you competed in Rio in 2016. You were the youngest US athlete there.

How is it going to be different now that you’re training for 2020? And do you feel like you’re more of a mentor in this role? Is it any different for you at all?

ALEXA HALKO: Yes, I believe it’ll be different, just because I’ve had more experience to get to know the sport a little better. I’ve been in it for– I started Paralympic-wise in 2014. So I’ve really gotten to be around more experienced athletes. And I feel like that will just keep building on itself, obviously, over the years. So I think that’s what will be different in 2020.

VINCE LARA: What did you learn from 2016 that you’re trying to apply to your 2020 training?

ALEXA HALKO: I learned that you’re going to have hard years. After 2016, it was such a frenzy. I was like, well, this is awesome. It’s your first Paralympic Games. You don’t even know what to think after that.

But the year after, in 2018, I didn’t have the best year. And I kind of just went with it and just stayed with it. But it kind of showed me that you’re not going to have the best years every year. You just got to go with it and just keep going, I guess.

VINCE LARA: Now, you loved basketball when you were growing up. So how did you transition into racing? What got you into that?

ALEXA HALKO: Yeah, so I actually played basketball and track at the same time. So it wasn’t really like an, oh, I’m choosing basketball over track. Even though I do love basketball still, track was just my main one, I would say, my main sport, just because I liked the solo part of it. I like a team, and that’s super awesome. But for me, I feel like just going solo and just doing my own thing is what I like.

VINCE LARA: OK. Yeah. Now, you were born in Oklahoma. Your family moved to Virginia. How did you end up here at Illinois?

ALEXA HALKO: Yeah. So I actually have been looking at this program since I started, because it’s commonly known that this is, like, the best program you can be in for the wheelchair track world. And so it’s always been an aspiration for me to come here since I was, like, 14. So I feel like I was just hoping and just keep training so I would come here.

VINCE LARA: Did you have any interaction with Coach Blakeney at all beforehand? Or was that something that was talked about in Paralympic circles, like, oh, Illinois is a great program?

ALEXA HALKO: Well, yeah, it’s always known to be the best program you can go to. So yeah, it is commonly known. And I would always see Coach Adam at competitions.

So I would always see him. And he would always be with the Illinois team. So I would hang out with them and know them. So it’s always been, I see them. And I’ve been aware that they’re around.

VINCE LARA: How much of your deciding to come to Illinois was based on even academics, beyond what DRES has in the wheelchair racing? Did you factor that in as, Illinois is a great school, too?

ALEXA HALKO: Yeah, no, for sure. It’s awesome that I can continue my education, but also be at such a great training program. And that just works, because I don’t want to just drop everything school-wise, but still keep going with my dream of racing and continuing my Paralympic, I guess, career. So I think it’s just the best of both worlds, because what could be better than this setup?

VINCE LARA: Absolutely. What are you studying at Illinois?

ALEXA HALKO: Yeah, so I’m a communications major.

VINCE LARA: OK. So this is perfect.

ALEXA HALKO: Yeah, actually.

VINCE LARA: That’s great. Now, you’re still so young. You’re 20?

ALEXA HALKO: I’m 19.

VINCE LARA: You’re 19.

ALEXA HALKO: Yeah.

VINCE LARA: So what’s next for this? How long do you expect you’ll compete? And then after that, will you coach? Do you see yourself as more of a mentor role?

ALEXA HALKO: I’ve never seen myself as a mentor, to be honest. I think coaches are awesome. I just never have put myself in that position.

I do like outreach and seeing the new kids come up, so maybe possibly in the future. But yeah, we’ll just have to see. I definitely just hope to keep training, keep competing, and just see where it kind of goes from there.

VINCE LARA: Well, how long do you think you’ll compete? Do you see 2024? Do you start to look and say, this is probably the last one I can do?

ALEXA HALKO: Yeah. I feel like if you’re in these cycles, you’re just thinking about, oh, the next games. You get in such a cycle mindset. And so I think I’ll go probably until 2024, maybe later. I’ll be here till 2022. And then whatever I do after that, I’ll probably stay here maybe.

VINCE LARA: Yeah, there’s grad programs.

ALEXA HALKO: Yeah, no, exactly.

VINCE LARA: Got to consider AHS.

ALEXA HALKO: Yep. So yeah, it might just go on from there. But we’ll see.

VINCE LARA: What do you think about beyond sports? What’s the career for you? So you’re studying communications now. Do you hope to break into that field?

ALEXA HALKO: Yeah, I definitely was thinking about something Paralympic-wise in communications. I think that would be really cool, just because I know a lot of the Paralympic track world-wise. And I feel like doing something with that, not just completely blowing it off– doing something with would be really cool, because I’ve been so in this world for a while.

VINCE LARA: With the USOPC or something in that range? OK.

ALEXA HALKO: Yeah, maybe.

VINCE LARA: Mm-hmm. And now that you’re here at Illinois, where do you see your future beyond school and work? Do you feel like you could settle here because of how great the training site is?

ALEXA HALKO: Yeah. I’m not really set on a certain location to live. Just because this program is so awesome, I know so many people who have stayed here just for the program. And that makes me think, hey, maybe that might be a good option, because so many people have succeeded from staying here. So it would be a good option, for sure.

VINCE LARA: What would be your advice to somebody who aspires to reach the Paralympics or even compete? Maybe they don’t make the team, but they’re in the training process for it.

ALEXA HALKO: Yeah, no. Definitely study, not in the school sense, but study your favorite racers. I think that’s kind of something that helped me. I just was observing my favorite racers and just–

VINCE LARA: Who were your favorite racers?

ALEXA HALKO: So I always looked up to Tatyana (McFadden). She’s the best woman–

VINCE LARA: And now you get to train with her.

ALEXA HALKO: Yeah, exactly. And that’s been an aspiration, because this is the program to be in, and then to race against or compete with some great teammates. But yeah, so just observing and just– people say it all the time– but just do it. Just keep going with it.

You’re going to have hard years. And it’s not going to go the way you always want it to go. But it’s just about staying with it, because that’s what’s got me here. So I’m going to keep going.

VINCE LARA: My thanks to Alexa Halko. This has been “A Few Minutes With.”

Tags: Alexa Halko, DRES, Paralympics

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