Junior Mikayla Shaw came to Elon as a Division I soccer player, but after quitting the team last year, she has found a way to bring her personal experience as a former athlete into research that could help others transition from student-athlete to simply student.
Shaw chose to leave the Elon women’s soccer team after two years as a player.
“There was a lot of things going on with the team at that point — some people got dismissed, some quit and I quit in the middle of all that,” Shaw said.
With all the extra time on her hands, Shaw knew she had to find a way to fill that void. Promted also by her need to make some extra money for law school, Shaw turned to the Elon Job Network in hopes of finding one
She applied for a number of jobs and now works for both the ticket office in the gym and the Office of the Registrar, which she knew was a job she wanted.
“It’s been amazing. You know how you have that coping mechanism, you go through all of your classes and you’re drained,” Shaw said. “When I go into the office and sit at that front desk — and I know it sounds weird — but even answering phones and doing my research, that’s my time.”
Every student worker in the office — there are more than 10 — is assigned both office hours and research hours. After she was offered the job, Registrar Rodney Parks sat down with Shaw to discuss her interests.
“There were six or seven girls who stopped playing at the same time as me,” Shaw said. “I wondered how many people have quit or got dismissed from teams to the point where transitions were really hard — because it is. The athlete world and the traditional student world are two completely different things.”
Parks was sold, and Shaw promptly started her research on the topic. To her surprise, there was little research done on the topic, which led her to conduct her own interviews with more than a dozen former athletes at Elon.
She was interested in the simple things, like how all athletes have an academic adviser who essentially organizes each student’s schedule, taking a lot of stress out of the class registration process. When athletes leave the team, they lose that support system.
“What I found is that student-athletes who quit don’t want to be cradled into the position of traditional student, but they do want a guideline,” Shaw said. “They don’t want to just be thrown into a whole new life.”
Shaw remembers she had many classes with teammates, and roomed only with other freshmen on her team.
“Traditionally, you would hang out with the people on your team or people on other teams,” Shaw said. “My point was to see if it happened anywhere else, and ways that higher education can help student athletes transfer to traditional students.”
Last month, Shaw had the opportunity to travel to Phoenix to present her research at the 102nd annual American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) conference. She was the only student alongside Parks and two other faculty members of the registrar’s office.
There are two parts of the meeting: presentations and posters. Not only did Shaw present her own research about student athletes, titled “Transitioning Challenges for International Student Athletes,” but she also presented her poster, titled “Disruptive Silence: Deepening Experiential Learning in the Absence of Technology.”
“You didn’t think it was really a big deal until you got there, and it was like, ‘Yeah, this is a big deal,’” Shaw said.
While working in the Office of the Registrar, all the student workers help each other on their research. Senior Alexander Taylor, who also works in the office and works closely on other projects, helped Shaw prepare for AACRAO.
“Mikayla is a very driven individual and has made a significant impact on Elon University over her three years through her athletics, her work and her overall demeanor,” Taylor said. “I was able to collaborate with her in preparation for her Arizona conference and she is very focused, very methodical with her work.”