Is A Degree In Exercise Science Worth It?

After going through the post-graduation job safari myself, counseling a number of students currently going through the job safari, and really getting a good look at what's out there, you eventually come to the question:

Was a degree in exercise science really worth it?

Not all college majors are created equal. TIME and Think Advisor have already proved that, and you can readily see the statistics on a number of other websites.

Like it or not, there are some majors that simply aren't useful. Philosophy and gender studies immediately spring to mind. You can't find a job with them. So automatically, we know that some college majors are duds.

However, some show more promise, such as is the case with exercise science. I was told again and again all through my undergrad just how expansive our field was going to grow, and how we would never have to worry about job security.

Maybe that's the case, and maybe it isn't (I'd argue more of the "isn't" line), but what my professors failed to mention was the pitiful pay you are likely to earn with a degree in exercise science.

The average student loan rate is currently around $30,000 after graduation, as you can see here. The average starting salary for somebody with a degree in exercise science is approximately $36,000, according to that Think Advisor link above.

How long do you think it's going to take you to pay off that $30,000 only making $36,000/year?

The answer? Forever.

What jobs do you qualify for with a degree in exercise science though?

Really, the only jobs are as a personal trainer, or as an exercise physiologist.

Unfortunately, you don't need a college degree to become a personal trainer. In fact, you really don't need anything to jump into personal training. You can get a job training at just about any gym out there after spending $100 on a certification test. Voila. You're a personal trainer, making an average of $37,000/year, according to Glassdoor.

The $100 test guy isn't going to know anywhere near as much as you are going to, but he's also not going to be $30,000 in the hole, in addition to the cost of not working full-time for 4 years while you were at college. To start off as a personal trainer, all you really need is a working knowledge of the gym, charisma, and to be in shape. Obviously that's a broad generalization, but seriously. I see a lot of trainers that know squat, yet they're good marketers of themselves. As a result, they sell.

So to work personal training as a career, I honestly can't say that a degree in exercise science is your best bet.

What about exercise physiology?

Depending on where you work, you may or may not need a master's in exercise science to land a job here. Unfortunately, those with a master's rarely make anything more than one with a bachelor's in exercise science. So a master's isn't worth it in my book.

What you are going to need no matter what, is some form of certification with diseased populations. Most 4-year programs have these put into their degree completion plans already. The ACSM CEP test is the best known.

A job as an exercise physiologist is certainly a lot more stable than as a personal trainer. With exercise physiology, you typically work for a hospital, and have set hours. Come in at 7am, leave at 6pm. Personal training is really just up to you. How many clients can you get?

Exercise physiology is certainly a lot more in-depth as well. You'll be working with cancer patients, guys who just finished having their chest sawed open, people with strange diseases, and incredibly brittle old ladies. You have to know what you can do, and what you can't. You have to know how that medication is going to affect Mrs. Jones' blood pressure. You have to know which exercises will flare up Bob's sciatica. It's on you. You mess up, and somebody can die, or get seriously hurt.

It's a lot more responsibility, As a result, you'll probably get benefits, and a median pay of $50,000 according to Glassdoor.

Now I'm not sure where Glassdoor gets their numbers from, but I can tell you that I've yet to meet an exercise physiologist (and I know a lot of them), who's making $50,000/year. Think more like $30,000. That $50,000 number may come from a big city like New York or San Diego where everybody makes more anyway (and everything costs more too).

I can remember my very last semester at college, when one of my professor's finally said something about our job opportunities. "Yeah, ya'll are probably going to have to go to grad school. You can't really support a family off of exercise physiology."

Shoot. That would have been nice to know.

If you absolutely have your heart set on exercise physiology though, you're going to need a degree in it.

As ya'll know, I am an exercise physiologist. I was a personal trainer. I absolutely love both of them. There is nothing like helping somebody to overcome a painful shoulder that nobody else could fix. To help a morbidly obese man lose 200 pounds. To help somebody with COPD not only now be able to walk across the room, but to get off of oxygen, and be able to do HIIT training. Exercise physiology rocks, and I love it.

However, I keep coming across students who are absolutely lost after they graduate. Ultimately, is it up to them to research their college major before taking classes? Absolutely. Is it wrong for exercise science professors to paint a pie-in-the-sky picture of exercise physiology for students though? Absolutely. Not a single one of my professors has ever worked as an exercise physiologist, and only one of them was a personal trainer. They have no clue. They're straight academics.

Am I complaining? No. If I knew what I knew now, would I still choose exercise physiology as a career? Yes. This is a passion of mine. I feel like I belong here. Paramedics make peanuts. They average $30,000/year, and yet there are still plenty of people out there who make that their full time job. Why? Because they love it.

So that's what it all boils down to with exercise science, I believe. Do you want to be a personal trainer? Skip college. You don't need it. Do you want to be an exercise physiologist, and have a full understanding of what that requires? Then do it. Are you planning on going to grad school afterwards in public health, physical therapy, biomechanics, MBA, med school, or something like that? Then by all means, take the exercise classes. You'll gain a different perspective from a lot of others out there, and be set financially.

However, if you think for a minute that you're going to make a large amount of money as an exercise physiologist, think again.

Just something to think about for all you upcoming potential exercise science students.

(And for the record, I went on to get my MPH. I absolutely love exercise science, and hopefully will be able to come back to it/somehow stay attached to it, but I want to be able to financially support my family, and I don't see that happening otherwise.)

Check out Eric Cressey's two awesome posts on the subject HERE and HERE. They may get you to thinking as well.

The $15 Car Break Down Kit

So I decided to make some car break down kits for my brother and sister for this Christmas. Student loans currently have me broke, so I needed to do it on a budget, and was very happy with what I was able to find.

Here it all is.

Inside is:

• 2 emergency blankets - $1.86
• 2 disposable rain ponchos - $2.49
• a serrated kitchen knife - $0.88
• 2 emergency glo-sticks - $2.00
• a roll of duct tape -$0.97
• 2 pieces of notebook paper - free
• 3 pack of tissues - $0.97
• 2 Walmart bags - free
• an LED flashlight - $1.50
• 1 water bottle - free
• a pencil - free
• 3 rubberbands - free
• a pair of non-slip work gloves - $1.99
• a tupperware container - $0.87

TOTAL = $12.99

 I think it all fits pretty nicely.

The lid doesn't stay on very well, so I tied it all together with some jute string I had lying around that I use for my tomatoes. That way the whole kit can bump around in the trunk without spilling everything all over the place.

The catch is that had I just made one car break down kit, it probably would have cost me a little bit more (around $20). I bought my material with the intent of making 4 of them, and so things ended up being a lot cheaper. The duct tape, Kleenex, kitchen knife, and tupperware container I all got from Walmart. The gloves and flashlight I got from Harbor Freight Tools, with the flashlight being part of a 2 pack. The emergency blankets, rain ponchos, and glo-sticks I all bought off of ebay in 6-10 packs.

I only bought items with free shipping, and a lot of the stuff I found was on sale.

Everything that you see that's listed as free I was able to just find around the house.

If I had decided to spend $5-10 more, I probably would have added a Powerbar, some matches, a screwdriver, pliers, bandaids, Neosporin, some bungee cords, and a mini plybar.

If I REALLY wanted to spend more money on them, I would have added jumper cables and a small tarp.

It's really not that expensive to make one of these things. Walmart, the Dollar Store, and ebay all seemed to have some of the best prices as far as I could tell.

I don't hope that their cars break down, but I do hope that these things will come in handy should that happen!

A Master's Degree

And just like that, after one final momentous push...grad school is over.

It's hard to think about.

I'm done. I've finished. I just finished two years of some of the most difficult schooling of my life while simultaneously working full-time. Holy smokes.

I'm glad it's over.

The amount of free time that I've had lately has been a fantastic breath of fresh air. I can DO things again. I spent this past weekend just chilling at my parents'. No papers to write, no deadlines, no presentations to prepare. Just a weekend.

It was awesome.

Thanks to the sheer amount of writing that grad school requires, I haven't been able to keep up to date on here as much as I would have liked. Writing is a finite resource. You can only spill so much at a time. I have managed to keep pictures of the past year or so on hand though.

This has been life:

I discovered a pretty sweet waterfall way in the backwoods...

There's a park nearby where I managed to capture this awesome sunset while attempting to dodge mud and baby ticks (yeesh)...

My brother got married...

This cool, little, philosophical frog was chilling by the pool of the beach house I got the opportunity to stay at for a while with some awesome people...

"So. What are you going to do with your life?"

I discovered that Yellowhed makes medium-rare boiled eggs...

This almost made a colleague throw-up.

We adopted a little puppy dog from the shelter who was terrified of men, raised her for 6+ months, and then had to give her away. With school and work going on, she was spending the majority of her day locked away in a cage. Not fair to her. She's now running and playing with a family of 11. 

Meet the puppy who knew she was going to get in trouble for pooping on my carpet, and covered it up with my sandal to hide it from me.

This hermit crab at the pet store made me laugh...

And, I've done a little kayaking...

Petsitting No More

Person: "Well, the dog is house trained, but only for my house."

Me: "Ok."

Person: "And she doesn't come anywhere near to being as good as your old one. She's pretty much Satan."

Me: "Oh."

Person: "Oh, and she's also in between flea medications. Sorry. If you see one, just give her a bath with this special lotion."

Me: "Alright."

Person: "Welp, gotta go. See ya."

Anybody Else?

When you disagree with just about every comment that your professor leaves on your paper...

"It's a research paper! The heading IS the transition!"

Everybody in Prison's Innocent

That moment when you have to peer-edit your fellow students' papers.

I absolutely detest peer-editing.

Professor: "Well, I'm too lazy to edit the paper myself, so I'll just have my students do it for me! And make it a grade! That'll work!"

I always end up with the paper that is in dire need of help, or the grader who thinks that peer-editing means you have to be a writing Nazi and mark up the paper as much as possible because THAT must be what the professor is looking for.

I fail to see how either scenario is helpful.

My latest encounter with peer-editing involved my grading a paper for a girl who clearly did not put in the appropriate amount of energy.

The paper was atrocious. To be in grad school, you should have some level of writing already mastered and this paper did not demonstrate it at all. We're talking fragments and nonsense all over the place. And I'm not one of the grammar Nazis either. Many times, if the paper looks fine, I'll send it back with maybe a few comments, but I try not to overdo it.

This paper was different though. It was terrible.

On top of all that, I found that the writer had inserted an extra space at the beginning of every sentence. For a paper with an assigned length to it, that looks veeeeeery suggestive of cheating to me.

And so, I put in a comment.

"I first thought this was isolated incidences here and there, but I've now noticed that you've put an extra space between the beginning of every sentence. Is this to increase the paper length?"

I'm not stupid. I know just about every trick in the book when it comes to increasing the length of a paper. Increasing every period's size one point, an extra "Enter" at the end of every page, yada yada yada.

And so, that's what this looked like.

The writer emailed me back saying that I was unprofessional and that she "didn't appreciate my snarky comments".

Well, shoot.

I don't think I'm going to reply to that email, but I think I now have further ammunition against why I hate peer-editing.

Time to go for a hike.

Why Do Physical Therapy Assistants Get Paid More Than Exercise Physiologists?

Why do physical therapy assistants get paid more than exercise physiologists?

It doesn't make much sense, does it?

To become an exercise physiologist typically involves at least a bachelor's in exercise science, and in many cases grad school as well. Then, at the very end you have to take an incredibly difficult certification exam.

The end result is a job with a great amount of autonomy, where your time is spent helping people who have had heart attacks/open heart surgery/lung transplants/etc. get back on their feet via exercise.

You have to understand EKGs, how medicines affect heart rate, exercise recommendations for a variety of conditions, biomechanics, how to know when your patient is hypoglycemic, gym structure, sales, and often a lot of business-keeping work as well.

The end result? An average salary of $47,000, according to indeed.com, and I've yet to meet an EP that makes that much.

A physical therapist's assistant however, goes to school for two years, typically at a community college setting, before taking a licensure exam. They have very little autonomy whatsoever, basically being at the mercy of the local physical therapist. They too understand some biomechanics, as well as exercise recommendations for a variety of conditions, but not to the extent that an EP is going to.

However, they're average salary is $59,000.

What gives?

How does more schooling, and more knowledge not equal more money?

My theory? Physical therapy leads to more tangible results, and provides a more exclusive service.

If a 44 year old mailman ends up with a frozen shoulder, he's going to be referred to physical therapy. He knows that he's not going to get better without it, and he desperately wants to be able to put his arm above his head again. He goes to PT, they work on the issue, the shoulder's fixed, and he never has another problem with it.

The mailman can vividly see the changes that PT worked for him, and nobody else would have been able to provide him that service.

Contrast that to the 44 year old mailman who has a heart attack. The doctor will refer him to cardiac rehab, but he may not even decide to show up. He knows that he needs to do cardio, so he decides to start riding the bike he's had stored in his basement the past 15 years. He may not know the correct target heart rate, the correct seat height, and how to progress, but he knows how to ride a bike by himself, and that's what he's gonna do.

Why waste money for an EP to tell him the same thing? That tends to be the mindset, anyway, even if it's not the case.

An exercise physiologist's services tend to be viewed as common knowledge, even though that's not the case.

"Oh, exercise more, and eat less. That's all they're gonna tell me."

Somebody with severe joint pain or post-orthopedic surgery is going to do what it takes to get themselves back to being pain-free with a full ROM. Pain is a powerful motivator.

Somebody with a cardiac or pulmonary condition is not necessarily living with pain, however, and they may see their event as a one time thing. You can see the differences in level of pain when PT is helping you out with your low back pain. You can't see the differences in decreasing your risk of future MI via working with an EP. Sure, you may feel healthier, and lose a bit of weight working with an EP, but you may still have a cardiac event anyway, and so what's the use, right?

So it all comes down to the type of patients that a PTA is going to work with compared with the patients that an EP is going to work with.

A PTA is going to work with people in severe amounts of pain, who will do anything to get back to where they were. Nobody else is legally licensed to work with these same customers over these same issues, and so they have an exclusive customer base. (=more money)

An EP is not always working with people in severe pain (CABG being the exception), and a lot of times work with weight loss clients, diabetic clients, and other clients who have similar issues. There's a lot of competition for these people. Local gyms, personal trainers, Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem - all of these people are competing for an EP's customer base.

Nobody says that a personal trainer can't workout with his client that had an MI and stent a month ago. 

He can't provide "cardiac rehab", but who's to say that he can't put his client on a progressive cardio plan starting off slow working on the bike, treadmill, and rower? Nobody.

Does this mean that an EP is going to be less knowledgeable about these issues than all of the other options? By no means. It's typically the opposite. But that's where marketing comes into play, and an EP has to be a good salesman if he wants to keep clients coming his way. A PTA doesn't have to worry about this. The PT takes care of it for them.

And that is why physical therapist's assistants make a significant amount of more money than an exercise physiologist. If you want patients to come specifically to you, you have to figure out a way to provide an exclusive service, and then market it as such.