Abigail Walker
My Honors Experiences
As a member of the Honors College here at IUI, I will take several courses that are either honors by structure or create a project for another course that makes it worthy of honors credit.
Introduction to Exercise Science Honors Contract
My first honors experience was doing a contract in my P212 course. I did 10 hours of job shadowing and created a reflection and presentation on my experience.
This project allowed me to solidify that I want to go into physical therapy and I even got a job at the clinic because of it. I get to continue to learn about the inner workings of being a physical therapist, while learning about insurance, modalities, and skills like multitasking and leadership.
Volunteer Opportunities
Being in the Honors College means that I also am obligated to do a certain number of volunteer hours yearly. So far, I've volunteered to set up the Momentum Indy bike race, helped at the Motor Activity and Ability Fitness Clinics, and taught at GOAL University. All of these experiences have helped me to develop my teamwork and leadership skills, along with allowing me to see some of the aspects of my career outside of a clinical setting while contributing to my community.
H200
In the spring of my freshman year, I took H200, which is an introduction to the Honors College and college itself. I've learned about skills that I should have as a student and skills that I will take with me into my future. One learning experience that stood out to me was examining the biases that may be especially relevant to an honors student, like an outcome bias or a projection bias. I learned that there are many ways to overcome any biases, once one is self-aware. We were also able to have two panels, to learn about engaged learning opportunities and ways to handle the stresses associated with being an honors student.
BIOL-K101
For the spring semester of my first year, I proposed an honors contract in introduction to biology. The concept was to build a model that demonstrated cellular processes such as glycolysis, the electron transport chain, and protein synthesis. Along with my model, I wrote out an explanation of the function of each organelle and a description of the processes. It was a really challenging project for me as it required some creativity and a lot of modification, but I learned a lot about my strengths and weaknesses from doing it.
KINE-P200
I completed this honors contract in the fall semester of my second year in a class called Microcomputer Applications in Kinesiology. For this project I decided to do an extra data collection and analysis using a force plate. We had participants jump from three positions. The first was a squat jump, the second starting from a 90 degree angle squat, and the third starting from a rock bottom squat. We analyzed the data and related it to optimum length of the muscles. This data has a lot of practical applications, and I enjoyed doing this project. It was more challenging for me than the other projects in this course because I didn't have a rubric to follow, but that helped me to explore more of the possibilities and applications of this data, which was interesting.
KINE-P409
This class was about the physiology of exercise, and my project was to explore a performance enhancer of my choice. I chose blood flow restriction because it was something I had seen in physical therapy and found interesting. One of the most difficult aspects of this project was reading through the many meta-analyses to find the right information to share in a twenty-minute presentation. There was a lot of information in every article I looked at, and deciding what to include and how to present it was challenging. I developed my ability to read scientific articles and gather information from them. I also improved my communication skills by determining how to best relay information from many sources. I really enjoyed doing this research and feel much more confident in my ability to do so now.
LHSI
I did an internship called a Life Health Sciences Internship for the 2024-2025 academic year. It was ten hours a week and allowed me to begin in a lab that I still help out in currently. See the LHSI page of this ePortfolio for more information.
KINE-P443
This course was another internship, but only a semester long. It focused on research, and was a discussion based curriculum. Each week we would read an article, write a summary and reflection of it, and then discuss. It helped me to see the scope of the research world and relate concepts to broader real world examples.
Group Project
In H200, we did a group project that focused on examining all the different types of biases, many of which I had never heard of before. We explored our own biases, as honors students and as people as a whole. My group presented on the outcome bias, which in simple terms is evaluating the quality of a decision based on the result of it. This bias is especially relevant to honors students, myself included, when related to study habits and test taking. Learning all these new types of biases has helped me to become more self aware, and as a group allowed us to discover resources to help with overcoming these.
Honors Panels
During the semester in H200, we were able to have two panels. One was more focused on student life and mental health with mostly student panelists, and the other was focused on engaged learning with more panelists from the administrative side of IUI. Both of these experiences revealed a lot about the opportunities within IUI and the techniques to manage the time and stresses relating to being a student. Being able to ask questions to people with more experience in engaged learning helped me to reflect on the opportunities that I most want to become involved in, and asking questions of the students allowed me to more deeply consider what I would be able to do with my time here. Both panels have allowed me to better understand the many opportunities I have as an honors student, and how to take advantage of them with my time in undergraduate school.
Other Course Work
Below are some of the other non-honors projects I've done in my time at IUI. Each project has an artifact and a reflection about what the project meant to me and how it has impacted my journey.
KINE-P373
Resistance Exercise and Sports Conditioning
Year-Long Training Program
One of the major assignments in P373 was designing a year-long training plan for a sport or person of our choice. I chose to program for a high school swim team. This project was very challenging initally because the only programming I had done before was for a singular workout. Going from one workout to a whole year was very intimidating, especially with all of the many factors to be considered. Planning the initial periodization was difficult, and I modified it several times throughout, but I learned a lot about how to program for a sport to optimize different aspects of athleticism while still providing sufficient rest and preventing burn out. I feel much more confident in my ability to plan workouts and programs after completing this project.
Global Learning Project
As a part of my learning community/bridge week course, I was able to learn a lot about global engagement. In our first week we were asked to create a project about global engagement and how it impacts our health and wellness and have built on that since. I chose to do mine focused on the comparison between the level of processing of foods in the US versus the rest of the world and created a potential plan that could help with that issue at IUI (previously IUPUI). This tied in perfectly with the global exchange program that followed.
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I was able to be involved in a global exchange program, where students from IUI were able to discuss nutrition with students from Newcastle University in England. Being able to connect with students from the UK was an incredible opportunity. I was able to learn about the similarities and differences between the nutrition of our respective nations in a way that simply reading dietary guidelines couldn't provide. Hearing firsthand opinions on the nutrition status of the UK was very revealing of the everyday reality of food there. I learned that global learning is something that everyone should participate in, because experiences like this allow a better understanding of other cultures and even of our own.
KINE-P403
I took this course the fall semester of my second year at IUI. It focuses on all-things cardio, including different modalities, teaching group exercise classes, incorporating it with resistance training, and ways to maintain fitness as one ages. One of the major things we did in this class to incorporate most of what we've learned is to make a group exercise video. My group chose to do a chair fitness video geared towards elderly people with limited mobility.
This was a great learning experience that showed me some of the more difficult aspects of my major. It was challenging to gauge what the skill level of our participants would be when designing the program, and figuring out how to present the information enthusiastically without many gaps in dialogue was as well. It caused me to think about some of the challenges that I will face with my career path and evaluate improving some of the skills that may not be my strongest.