SPRINT project final year PhD student Georgia Bird recently had the opportunity to present and attend the North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity (NASPSPA) conference in Toronto, Canada. The conference had three key areas: sport and exercise psychology, motor learning and control, and motor development.
On day 1, Georgia presented findings from one of her thesis chapters which explores student-athletes mental health profiles and identifies risk and protective factors for profile membership. This research and Georgia’s PhD has a key focus on athlete mental health from the perspective of Keyes’ (2002) dual-continua model of mental health (see How to improve your mental health through well-being (sprintproject.org)) as well as exploring how athletes regulate their emotions (see How to Regulate Our Emotions 101 (sprintproject.org). As this was Georgia’s first opportunity to present her work on an international scale, it was great to present to such an encouraging crowd.
On the 3rd and final day, Georgia also did a poster presentation highlighting the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on student-athletes self-reported symptoms of mental illness. Positioned amongst many insightful and inspiring posters, Georgia had some excellent discussions with conference attendees who stopped by.
“Although it was very daunting to attend a conference alone, I believe this provided me with lots of opportunities. I was lucky that my talk was on the morning of the first day as this gave me an opportunity to connect with others in my session, meet others interested in similar areas of research, and researchers interested in very different topics. It was also great to explore Toronto. I flew out a couple of days early and had a chance to unwind and explore – a particular highlight was visiting Niagara Falls (pictured below). Now I am back in the UK with a spark of motivation to take me up to completion of my PhD.”
Thank you to my funders the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for funding the conference attendance.
Photo credit: Georgia Bird.
Written by Georgia Bird, PhD Researcher and Research Associate in the SPRINT Project.