Lit Review

     When initially starting the research for the literature review, I found that the research was relatively easy to come across. The topic I am working on is collegiate student-athletes. Although I suspected there would be more, there was a significant amount of information to utilize for my group's literature review. We were each able to find two or more articles that assisted us putting the review together. I think the difficulty with this aspect was finding that we each of our own writing styles and making it flow between articles was more difficult than we anticipating.

     Simply working on peer reviewing other groups literature reviews as helped me recognize where we need to improve on our own. I think we initially lost the direction we were going due to being so hyper-focused on the actually information itself. I believe that the information we found is useful and pertinent to our topic. I also believe that we have provided ourselves with a good basic understanding of what we are going into, but what we need to do is focus on how we are going to utilize the information and research we found to apply it to helping collegiate athletes find a career path. 

     We were able to start the review off with who student-athletes are and move on towards the difficulties student-athletes encounter upon graduation with no career plan ahead of them. A useful direction we should move towards now is the research that regards the interventions that must take place in undergraduate school, while they are still students, and how we can apply them in our workshop. I think the biggest issue student-athletes come into is when they graduate, they never focused on a career, but just the sport they are playing.

     I was a student-athlete, and although I was only playing Division II, I sort of fell into this mistake and path. I had to maintain a certain GPA and if I did not, I would have to attend the team study hall twice a week, but this is the extent of my career knowledge while in school. My grades were good, but I did not know what to do with them or my major (that I chose mostly on a whim). It did work out for me in that I took a risk by moving away from home and finding a job in my field and worked multiple jobs overs two years to gain experience that led me to make a decision to go to graduate school to become a counselor. But others are not as lucky and they fall back onto jobs that they did not like or enjoy. If I had more guidance, I may have gotten an internship or started graduate school earlier. I could have possibly gone a different route altogether.

     I hope from this project and creating this workshop, that it could potentially help other people as it has already helped me reflect. I understand, more than before, what direction this project needs to go and how to get there. Previously, I felt a little lost so I believe the peer reviews are helping.