• Question: what different roles are their for sports scientists in the working world ?

    Asked by hudse2011 to Andrew, Dan, Emilia, Helen, Katy, LauraAnne, Stephanie on 9 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: LauraAnne Furlong

      LauraAnne Furlong answered on 9 Nov 2016:

      There’s lots of different things we can do. For example, from my sport science degree, people have gone into jobs such as working as a strength and conditioning coach and fitness training, rehabilitation of different people, promoting physical activity, sports nutrition, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, radiography, medicine (for each of those last four, people did a masters to specialise), sales of medical products and devices, sports journalism, sports psychology, health promotion with the government and hospitals, performance analysis (you know all the match statistics you can get? they work doing that), engineering, teaching, neuroscience (science of the brain) as well as research and lecturing. That’s just some of the people I know and I’m sure some of the other scientists know people doing lots of other things.

      The exciting thing about sport science is that it doesn’t just teach one set of skills or only a small bit of knowledge, you learn all about the human body, how it works, how people work, so you can transfer that knowledge to lots of different areas of life, and problems we face in everyday life.

    • Photo: Katy Griggs

      Katy Griggs answered on 9 Nov 2016:

      I agree with Laura Anne. In addition to the jobs listed I know individuals who have gone on to work as support staff for athletes (as either a physiologist or nutritionist), researchers in sports clothing companies (to check how I body responds when wearing sports clothing i.e. ventilation in clothing), work for the ministry of defence for either the Army or Navy looking at a range of topics including occupational clothing, fitness of recruits etc., researcher in sport technology companies, translational scientists (making research findings useable for the public) and talent identification of athletes.

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