Tristan Nielsen

Mr. Rudebusch

Prairie Lakes Wellness Center

4/11/22

Reflection

For my senior project, I decided to study and observe the athletic training field. This project took

more than 20 hours of working between my research, shadowing, product, portfolio, and presentation.

The majority of this time was spent shadowing Dave Greenman who works at the Prairie Lakes Wellness

Center in Watertown, SD, and creating a final project. With 20 hours of shadowing and 3 hours research,

planning, and intense through on my product, this led to over 20 hours already. The rest was about 2

hours of coming up with a research topic to talk over my essay.

When creating my senior project, I kind of new what I wanted to but not quite exactly what. I

wanted to work on coming up with a workout plan, but I didn’t know what I wanted to base this

workout on. In a typical workout a bunch of different exercises surround your main workout. To explain

this, when I want to work on my chest as the topic of workout, I will work on the bench press and OHP

(Over Head Press) but that won’t be my entire workout as I would add dumbbell curls and maybe even

add in something to do with my legs. To overcome the problem of not knowing what to do I based my

workout on something a younger cast would ask for. This seemed simple, but a lot distracted me with

this project when it came to outside activities. At the start of school year came football season, then

came homework which was a full 4 months of football which meant practice everyday after school. Then

was a rest period between basketball and that’s when I did some shadowing and worked on this project
a little more. The break wasn’t very long because a choir trip to Chicago started things off with a week in

Chicago and once, we got back it was Thanksgiving and then basketball started up.

By shadowing Dave Greenman, I was able to see the daily life of an Athletic Trainer. Since I was

leaning more towards a field in exercise science, this was a perfect opportunity to see whether I would

want to pursue a career in that field. The job of an Athletic Trainer is very schedule based. It requires I

am at this spot at this time with this person which is a good but bad thing because if I need to get

something set up then I’m going to need to find someone to help. In this case Dave has another trainer

with him that’s an older lady but she knows what she is doing. In being an Athletic Trainer, you need to

be a people person because you need to hear out what they want and if they feel any discomfort when

training. Communication plays a big role as well because when talking to people you don’t want to mess

up anything or injure someone that’s doing what you told them to do. I have found through this project

that I will be pushing to pursue an Athletic Trainer position or at least fall in the category of a personal

trainer if I can’t get that specific role.

In the future, I will be able to use all these skills from this experience to be successful in

whatever I choose. It has taught me to carefully listen to what they are telling you because you don’t

know what hurting or if they are in discomfort with an exercise. These traits will help me throughout the

rest of my life and help me in the career I pursue with the social, communicative, and even learning

aspect of life. In conclusion, I want to thank Mr. Rudebusch for this project, as it has better prepared me

for the real-world and what I should be expecting. This project is truly something awesome and can be

taken in any way but if you at least try and work with the people you want to become this project will

definitely help people find what they want to do.