• Question: why did you become a scientist instead an athlete?

    Asked by luke9b to Aggelos, Andrew, Eileen, Naomi, Shane on 15 Nov 2012. This question was also asked by aoifedelaney.
    • Photo: Aggelos Zacharopoulos

      Aggelos Zacharopoulos answered on 15 Nov 2012:

      @luke9b
      I was very good both at my studies and at sports at school. I had won awards for science and had also won athletics championships. When I had to decide what course to apply for at the University I seriously considered continuing my athletics while studying PE. But at that time I had limited understanding what my career options were by being an athlete. I could not see that science and sports can actually go together. I considered the job prospects for me to be limited as an athlete. So I just went for the science option, studying physics and just did my sports in my spare time (my parents were happier with this choice too 😉

      I dont regret the choice that I made. I think it has given me a good life and helped me achieve my potential as a person. Nowadays of course, it is a lot more clearer that athletes can have a career making a good living out of it and even better, they can become sports scientists!

    • Photo: Naomi Elster

      Naomi Elster answered on 16 Nov 2012:

      I was hopeless at sports in school. In college, I had the chance to try a lot of sports and found a few I really liked – I even fenced (sword-fighting!) on the Irish student team and got to go to Bristol, representing Ireland! But that’s about as far as my athletic career was ever going to go.

    • Photo: Eileen Diskin

      Eileen Diskin answered on 18 Nov 2012:

      I played a few sports in school – soccer and tennis. I was better at tennis, and got to go to the city championships for it. But I wasn’t nearly good enough to do it professionally…so now I focus on the science, but I still play sports in my free time!

    • Photo: Andrew Jackson

      Andrew Jackson answered on 20 Nov 2012:

      I played a lot of sport at school, including rugby, athletics and then soccer. I dont think i would have been good enough to become a serious professional, so left that to the more talented people and stuck with science! Recently i have found that i love cycling – both off-road on mountain trails, and road cycling. I wish i had found this when i was younger, as now im busy trying to lose lots of weight to go faster!

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