Biomedical sciences student and athlete changes track

When Janelle started her first year at the University of Waterloo, she had no intention of splitting her time between academics and sports.

Studying Biomedical Sciences and with a goal to get into medicine someday, she assumed she had to choose textbooks and labs over running shoes.

She’s glad she eventually changed her mind and joined the varsity track team.

“Starting university, I felt slightly isolated,” say Janelle, who is now finishing her final year in the program.

Training for sprints, hurdles, and long jump even helped her academic drive. Before joining the team, Janelle admits she was more prone to procrastination. But juggling school and extracurriculars meant learning how to up her time-management game.

“If I have four hours instead of eight, it’ll force me to avoid spending seven hours doing nothing and then trying to cram in the last hour,” she says. “It helped me with studying.”

Doing it all and brightening days

Today she is putting those lessons to good use in other ways. A strong student, she has excelled in Biomedical Sciences where she’s learned everything from cell biology to genetics and embryology. At the same time, she has been a Science Faculty Ambassador, part of the Interuniversity Council executive, a teaching assistant, and varsity tutor helping other athletes thrive academically — and even did a stint as a volunteer at nearby Grand River Hospital.

For a couple of months she worked with Hospital Elder Life Program (HELP) patients experiencing dementia symptoms. Research shows that social interactions help prevent confusion and brain fog when these patients are in the same environment day in and day out. Having volunteers come in to play bingo or cards, or asking patients to tell them stories about themselves can ease symptoms.

“On my breaks from studying, it was nice to go over there and just communicate with other people in the hospital and brighten their day,” Janelle explains.

Meanwhile, training with the Varsity team was a bright spot in the middle of challenging classes and studying for Janelle. While she admits there were times she wondered why she put herself through gruelling training relay and sprint sessions and competitions, after they were over, she says she felt “nourished.”

Her favourite event? Sprint hurdles.

“There’s so much to focus on. And especially as a person who’s in science and likes things more concrete and less ambiguous, that plays into it. There’s a lot of technique,” she says.

The long hours training paid off, not that she noticed at first. Janelle thought of track as a hobby, a way to meet people and blow off steam. So she was dumbstruck when she competed at the Ontario University Athletics (OUA) provincials in first year — and won the gold medal in long jump.

“I was like, ‘I’m just here to have fun!’ Winning seemed like such an impossible task,” she says, calling the win an “eye-opening experience.” For the first time she realized that if she put her heart and soul into something, she could excel. Her progression in first year reinforced her self-confidence. “It made me feel a lot better about myself as an athlete and just as a person.”

Using Biomedical Sciences to think big

It’s that kind of poise that has helped her navigate her Biomedical Sciences degree and what she plans to do with it. While she originally assumed, like many students do, it would be her stepping stone to medical school, today she’s thinking broader now. The Biomedical Sciences degree gives her so many career options.

“I’ve fallen in love with the field of neuroscience,” she says, explaining she enjoyed her psychology courses and is now looking into careers in neuroscience research and neurodegenerative diseases. Her time as a teaching assistant and varsity tutor, and her lab courses, showed her what is possible.

Taking what she’s learned on the track and in class, Janelle — who eventually became varsity track captain — gave back to the athletic community by becoming a varsity tutor for first year math.

The tutors are there to help athletes when they’re struggling in a subject. Janelle explains that other athletes “get” what it’s like to balance the rigors of sports and academics in a way other students and professors can’t.

Becoming a tutor has helped her in surprising ways. Janelle says she learned the difference between knowing a math concept well enough to get a good mark in class — and well enough to actually teach it to another student. She uses that benchmark when studying for herself now too. When she feels confident she can teach a concept, she knows she fully understands it enough herself.

Make connections and thrive

While Janelle’s successes at Waterloo seem amazing now, she’s the first to admit she felt like any other first-year student when she landed on campus: nervous and with a healthy dose of imposter syndrome.

Let it go, she advises. Instead, find something you’re passionate about and build a community around it. And it’s okay to take baby steps at first. Maybe just attend one club meeting and see how it is.

“For me, I’ve built some of the strongest long-lasting connections of my life with people on the track team. That on its own has given so much insight,” she says. “So, try to be gentle with yourself, put yourself out there — and take it one step at a time.”