My Favorite Class: Ashley Kent

To be a student-athlete at Iowa State is, as the title says, to be a student, and an athlete. The whole point of coming to college is education. The wealth of other opportunities offered to all ISU students supplements that experience. For Cyclone gymnast, Ashley Kent, academics are just as important as the balance beam. The senior in nutritional science has had continued gymnastics success, and been able to continually learn and succeed in the classroom as well.

“It is definitely a learning process and you have to make little sacrifices here and there, but you get it eventually,” Kent said. “Your first year is spent learning to manage your time. In high school I didn't have a lot of homework, so I would just come home from practice, go to bed and go to school. Here, you have to plan your day down to the hour. You really have to try to fit stuff in between everything because by the time I get home I'm so tired that I don't get anything done.”

Good study habits earned Kent a spot on the Academic All-Big 12 First Team in 2008, 2009 and 2010 and NACGC/W Academic All-American honors in 2006-2009. Good grades are necessary for the senior's future plans.

“I want to go to med school, I think I want to be a pediatrician,” Kent said, “I want to work with kids.”

This semester Kent is taking food science 464 to help her pursue her future career options.

“I want to be a doctor, so I think it is the closest class to what I really want to do in the future,” Kent said. “I like how relevant it is to what I want to do. I really enjoy this class, and I can see my self benefiting from it. I am learning things that I will use in the future. ”

Food science 464 is the second of a two-part course. Food science 461 is the first section that deals mostly with learning medical terminology.

“We had to take quizzes on medical terminology, so all the prefixes and suffixes that you see in long disease words, we had to learn those,” Kent said. “It's hard, there are things that don't make sense at all and you just have to know them, but when you go through it every week it makes sense because it builds on the week before. You can see how things in words like tendinitis, like how the “itis” means the same thing in different words.”

In the second section, 464 the focus is on application, case studies and detailed tests.

“We have case studies for homework, but besides that it is really mostly tests. They are very detail-specific, which is hard, but at the same time I like it,” Kent said. “You can't just know the broad stuff and go in to the test and do well.”

The NCAA saying goes, ?There are 380,000 student-athletes, and most of them will go pro in something other than sports.' Kent hopes to go pro as a pediatrician. For now she gets good grades, and takes classes like food science 464 to prepare for a bright future, in something other than sports.

Players Mentioned

Ashley Kent

Ashley Kent

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