While summer can mean a break from academics for many students, this July three Department of Exercise Sciences PhD students boarded a plane for Bern, Switzerland to present their research at the 14th European Congress of Sport Psychology.
Ellen MacPherson, Elaine Cook and Jenessa Banwell –all supervised by Professor Gretchen Kerr—reaped multiple benefits from the international excursion, from taking in the local sights and getting to know one another as colleagues, to ramping up their academic resumes through knowledge exchange with international peers.
Cook, who lived in Europe for a decade, felt like she was ‘coming home’ when she travelled to Switzerland to present her paper, ‘Athlete-Centred Coaching: A Solution-Focused Approach.’ “I am always inspired by the work of our international colleagues. I am challenged to think creatively, and learn more. I look for opportunities to collaborate and share,” Cook reflects. “I often see connections that might have remained unseen – both figuratively and literally. And I love listening to, and trying to speak, other languages, which enriches the vocabulary of my life and story!”
MacPherson says presenting her two papers paper, ‘Safeguarding in Sport: Sport Psychologists as Reflective Practitioners,’ and ‘Bullying in Female Adolescent Sport Teams’ to an international group was similarly inspiring. “The conference was a great opportunity to meet and interact with international graduate students, professors and practitioners and to receive feedback on my research and experiences in the field,” she explains. “It is also exciting to learn about the ways in which research, policies, and practice related to sport psychology are similar or different across various countries.”
Banwell presented her paper, ‘Pursuit of Athletic Excellence and Personal Development.’ The Varsity Blues soccer alumna and coach says that the exposure to a breadth of experts in an international forum provided “the opportunity to gain a better understanding of the international scope of research related to my areas - personal development in high performance sport and women in coaching.”
Professor Kerr is proud of her graduate students for seizing the opportunities to meet and interact with established and emerging scholars from around the world. “These opportunities facilitate the exchange of information with others that cannot be achieved as effectively through any other means,” Kerr explains. “They also broaden students’ perspectives on their areas of research, and contribute to the intellectual curiosity that is so important for advancing research and scholarship.”