What is your greatest personal achievement?
“Honestly, just being able to figure out what I’m going to do with my life. I feel like I finally got to a point when I knew where I wanted to go that’s encompassing both what I’m doing for my major in Athletic Training as well as my passion to work with the population of people with special needs. So finally figuring out how to combine those two and do physical therapy with people who have these needs; it was a really cool feeling to one day just go ‘Oh, that’s what I want to do, that sounds perfect!’ Just coming to that realization of where I want to take my life felt like a great achievement.”
What originally inspired you to pursue Athletic Training and Physical Therapy?
“In high school, I took an ‘Intro to Athletic Training’ class and it was one of the only classes that I did exceptionally well in during high school, so I wondered if that was a sign of something I should do. It came very easily to me; all the concepts and anatomy and everything else involved in it. I went through high school doing that and then when I got into college, I thought ‘This is what I want to do.’ The last couple of years have been feeling it out and figuring out what it would mean and entail in the real world and that’s how I came to the conclusion that I needed to combine those two passions.”
With all of that in mind, what’s a big goal of yours for the future? Personal or career?
“I really want to be a physical therapist for those with special needs. Something really big and awesome would be to help and work for the Special Olympics one day. I think that’d be the apex of my career. Something really up top at the Special Olympics, helping those kids and adults with physical therapy and training. Also, I’m going for a Coaching minor so if I got to coach in the Special Olympics, that would be amazing. I feel that it would be very fulfilling to me. I just love what I do.”
– Ben Bonser
Beneath The Crown is a project created by Nick Theisen (‘15). It is inspired by Humans of New York and aims to bring the community of Gustavus Adolphus College closer together by providing the perspectives of the many different people who live and work at the school.