We will be using a series of articles to illustrate the typical day for a college scholar/athlete. In this case, we will be using Matt Garner, a Bellwood-Antis grad and Juniata College student. Matt is majoring in Pre-Med, and holding down the Number One position in his class, while finding time in his busy schedule to play both football and baseball. Garner was a starting outfielder for the Eagles in the spring and one of Juniata’s leading hitters and is the starting strong safety on the football team, currently tied for the lead in tackles.
We will take the typical week for Matt and divide it up into one day at a time. This week for your perusal, we begin with what Matt’s description of what he does on Mondays during the football season.
MONDAY:
Typically Monday’s are the longest and most tedious days of the week. My morning consists of four classes: Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, The Social History of Medicine, Human Communications, and Physics. At noon, I work my way down to the cafeteria where I eat lunch with some of the other players.
After lunch I head to the science center for Biostatistics Laboratory from 1:00-5:00. Generally labs at Juniata are long, drawn out ordeals, but they are supposed to help prepare you for the tires of research. Considering that films for football being at 4:00, I usually don’t make it on time, and therefore have to come in at other times during the week to watch the past Saturday’s game.
When lab is finished I work my way down to practice just in time for stretching. Monday’s are light days with only helmets (generally there is a JV game so we are short handed) where we put in some of the week’s game plans and finish with some heavy conditioning. Practice is usually over around 6:30.
After practice I will eat dinner and then head to the library or science center to get some work finished, provided I don’t have any meetings to attend. Most of my studying consists of reading, but occasionally I will work in study groups or do research for different labs or projects. Typically I try to make it back to my room by 11:00, although this is not always the case.
