Students travel to Waco to test their knowledge
Every year the Texas Regional Chapter of the American College of Sports Medicine (TACSM) holds its annual “Jeopardy” competition and lecture to test students’ knowledge in the field of kinesiology and sports medicine.
This was TACSM’s 16th annual meeting in Waco, Texas, held on Feb. 21 which saw Texas A&M University-Kingsville (TAMUK) be a platinum sponsor and send three students to compete in the TACSM “Student Bowl.”
The “Student Bowl” is a Jeopardy-style competition during which students use their combined skills and areas of expertise to answer questions as a team. TAMUK’s team placed fourth out of 40 teams.
“I feel like it helps out a lot, it especially helps you memorize a lot of topics, and it keeps you in touch with those topics. I also feel like you get a closer relationship with the professors instead of just being a student in class, going to class, doing the work and then just going back home and all that. So, I feel like with the student bowl it helps out a lot. You just get to open up your horizons,” said Julian Gonzales, a kinesiology student who competed at TACSM.
Along with the competition, the TACSM also allows students to meet with other similar majors and professors.
This is where they exchanged ideas and offered advice about the field and careers in the field.
“At the conference there were a lot of different little booths for other schools, so I got to learn more about physical therapy stuff and got some connections so it’s pretty cool,” said Jillian Jones, who competed at TACSM. “It is a great experience all around especially with the connections. It helps me, personally, meeting all the different professors at the different PT schools. I also got a better realization of the difficulty it is to get into PT school, so it just makes me want to work harder. And also, the competition helps you just kind of relearn a lot of things.”
With a field of study as broad as kinesiology, relearning and being retaught the things that tested the students was a huge factor in why competition can be crucial to being successful after graduation.
“It really has made me love the science a whole lot more and want to continue my education. It also helps me and Jill because we’re tutors so it really helps so much. All that previous knowledge and everything it definitely helps you remember lots of information,” Mel Martinez, who also competed, said. “For example, I took exercise physiology my first semester here, so it definitely helps you like be able to recall information and be able to apply it in questions that are worded differently. It also helps you with your studying too it just helps with all exercise sciences because everything is very much so built on itself.”