-: My name is Krista Gwilliam,
I serve as the assistant director
for fitness programs
within the recreational sports department
here at Virginia Tech.
In my role, I oversee all of the fitness programming
for the University, so personal training,
group exercise, small group training,
strength and conditioning programming.
And then I also teach two different academic classes,
through the H and FV department.
So we teach two different types of classes.
We teach an exercise leadership course,
which basically serves as a prep-course
for students who want to become,
either a group exercise instructor
or a personal trainer.
And so those are semester long, three credit classes,
involving lectures and labs, and things like that.
The other type of class that we teach
is an activity based course.
And so the one that we teach is titled, Weight Training.
And so they come in, we teach them the basic principles
of writing a exercise program,
get them familiar with the weight room,
and then start getting them to write their own programming.
And then basically the second half of the semester,
they are exercising everyday in class
and going through their programming that they've created.
So every week tends to be busy for us,
and it's all very different,
because our staff itself is about 150 student staff-members,
where we're typically juggling between schedules
and helping students in need.
I think one of the cool things about our job
is that we're helping to develop students
in to fitness professionals and so a lot of our job
is helping them write a work-out program
for a particular type of client,
or helping them program their next cycling class
that they're gonna teach that week,
or things like that,
but a lot of my week and day-to-day stuff
is working with the students one on one in that capacity.
So we very much have an open door policy,
and so, oftentimes it's from one student
to the next coming in.
And we really serve as an open space for them
to just kind of dive in to whatever knowledge
it is that they're looking for.
So, like I said, whether they've got a client
with a particular need, that they're not familiar with,
they can dive into the knowledge that we have
as professionals, but then we also
do a lot of researching and things like that with them.
So it's kind of a shared space,
to grow in that capacity.