Workshop highlights world of opportunities beyond medical school for kinesiology students

Associate Professor Dylan Kobsar wanted to do more for kinesiology students than write reference letters.

Many of those students were applying to medical school. All were brilliant yet some would likely need to make alternate plans – last year, Ontario’s six medical schools received 24,313 applications for 1,112 seats for an overall 4.5 per cent acceptance rate. The province’s seventh medical school, which opens this September at Toronto Metropolitan University, received 6,415 applications for 94 seats.

Dylan suspected students were missing out career opportunities they knew nothing about. “There are so many fields you can go into with a kinesiology degree. It’s a credential that opens many doors.”

Instead of telling students about their career options, Dylan decided to show them. Four years ago, he teamed up with Ben Bahrami from McMaster Performance and Alena Luciani, an athlete turned performance  coach and founder of Training2XL in Toronto.

Together they launched the McMaster Performance & Wellness Workshop to showcase careers in rehabilitation, sport performance, fitness, coaching, biomechanics, nutrition and wellness.

They drew on their experiences going to conferences and workshops, adopting the hits and skipping the misses. “We sat around a table and said let’s do this and this but not that. We wanted an event that would keep everyone engaged from start to finish and deliver real value and be grounded in science.”

Their workshop would offer students, alumni and community members a mix of applied research talks and interactive demos that blended theory with practice. “We wanted to find that sweet spot where the workshop’s educational and entertaining.”

To recruit big name speakers from across North America, they drew on their connections in academia, industry and professional sports. “We wanted to connect students with experts and entrepreneurs they might never otherwise get the chance to meet.”

Dylan believes the networks that faculty members build and belong to are an underutilized resource. “If we had more hours in our day, we could be introducing so many more of our students to the remarkable and inspiring people we’ve met and collaborated with over the years.” The workshop was a way to make those introductions happen over the course of a single weekend.

Hosting the workshop on campus also made it easier for students to work up the courage to connect with guest speakers. “Students tend to feel more relaxed and comfortable in their own space. Being somewhere familiar takes a lot of pressure off of introducing yourself to someone you don’t yet know.”

Nearly 100 students, alumni and community members attended the 2021 McMaster Performance & Wellness Workshop and the turnout’s held steady over the years. Every expert who was invited to deliver a talk or run demo at the first workshop said yes. And the event broke even – “we were doing this for students and not to make money.”

For Dylan, the payoff for months of planning and a few sleepless nights heading up to the workshop came during the networking between talks and demos. “All of the students kept lining up to talk one-on-one with every guest speaker. Everyone had a great time.”

The success of the first workshop convinced Dylan, Ben and Alena to make it an annual event. Ben has since moved on to work with the Toronto Raptors so Dylan Whitbread, the new manager of McMaster Performance has taken lead on planning the 2025 Performance and Wellness Workshop with Dylan and Alena.

The fourth-annual McMaster Performance & Wellness Workshop takes place Friday, June 20^th and Saturday, June 21^st at McMaster. Order tickets here.