Athletic Training Essay

The Balance of Coursework and Experience for Athletic Trainers

Do universities really prepare students for the real world? Kinesiology is a field of study for many job opportunities ranging from Physical Therapist, Personal Trainer, Strength and Conditioning Coach, Athletic Trainer, and many more. Kinesiology has a variety of classes you need to take and many different Internship jobs, but some universities don't allow Internships until you meet the requirements. While many universities require practical experience in the field before they start interning, on-the-job training is a better way for students to learn than more academic classes that don’t directly relate to the field.

According to the University of Nebraska-Omaha, “Students

So are the universities really preparing us for the real world or are they just giving us extra classes that we will not need? Newell wrote a background and history about kinesiology. “Kinesiology provides a professional and performance approach to the study of physical activity.” This study stays on the topic of athletes and the physical activity that they do. Universities don't provide the history behind how Kinesiology was founded and they’re using different varieties of classes that students don't need to learn and giving students a class to provide better knowledge of that academic structure. According to the catalog at UNO, it states that “Introduction to statistical evaluation of Testing and measurement techniques,” consists of math. Many universities put Kinesiology students into this class for a better understanding of the statistics of kinesiology. But without knowing what the math classes consist of and what you will learn, the statistics of Kinesiology is not a part of math but provides testing techniques used in Health & Kinesiology. Allowing students to learn statistics is important for testing techniques in this study, but understanding why they give us math classes is unknown. With this students may need math for other jobs in this degree, but for Athletic Trainers, it has no part of

Allowing myself to go out in the community and have the opportunity to talk to athletic trainers gave me a bigger perspective on how universities are not allowing students to have the ability to intern and shadow other ATs. While I talked to Jordan from the Sioux Falls Stampede, he told me face to face that if students have the experience and techniques that I have learned over the past few years he would hire them to shadow, and for hands-on, they would wait until he feels like the students are comfortable to work with the athletes. Through my college search, I looked at Augustana in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the counselor there told me you can shadow the Athletic Trainers at the university and when they feel like you're ready for hands-on work they will allow you to work on the athletes. This goes back to the question that some universities really aren't preparing students for the real world, while some are getting students involved in things early in their college careers. Universities not allowing on-the-job training and just providing class knowledge will never teach students what the real world consists of. Classroom learning provides just the