The sports science programme means to me understanding every aspect of sports and movement
even better. The sports science programme means to me the possibility of getting a very broad education
in sports and to allow me to work with the thing that I love the most – that's football. The sports
science programme means to me to understand and explain the fascinating world of human performance.
Sport and exercise sciences is an interdisciplinary field where
the students gain a lot of knowledge in different perspectives or from different
perspectives and then they can apply this to different fields. So this scientific thinking
and the application into the different domains of practical sport and exercise
are the main skills that we are targeting at with our programme. But before we start I
wanted to ask you if you remember the four essential body language tips. The language of
our programme is English and we have students from all over the world and also we have lecturers from
more or less all over the world. You have to get used to it in the beginning when you come from
school and then everything is in English and you have to get used to it a little bit. But
I actually like it a lot because it gives you the opportunity to get along abroad. You need
to bring a broad interest in different topics, so you should be interested in research, you should be
interested in movement, sports-related questions, but you also need to be interested in
mathematics and statistics. For example if you have a neuromotor that would require more
physics and biomechanics and also some software knowledge with programming and things like that.
But you also have more psychological parts like sports psychology oriented or humanistic
with social aspects and gender and diversity in sports. So you have a really big mix. I think
every student at some point will find their own good spot, like their own strengths, but also some
difficulties that need to be worked on to go through it. After theoretical input in the first
three semesters, the students get more and more involved into practical parts of the programme. So
they start their own research project supervised by the different departments. Here they go into
international internships all over the world and they go into little research programmes where
they can apply their different methodological learning outputs that they have gained over time.
We have small groups. We have only 30 students per year, meaning that
students get to know each other very well and also the teachers or the lecturers get to
know the students very well. If you're interested in an internship or in a workplace or whatever
you just go to someone who you think will be able to do something there and they will
call or help you and you always feel supported. And I think all of us are somehow
passionate about one particular sport. There are a lot of different people
from a lot of different backgrounds in different sports. But still
there's also the possibility in our practical courses to experience different sports you don't
necessarily have to be good at, but it's helpful to have an understanding about everything.
I would say we have optimal facilities here in Münster because we have an own campus for our students
here and we have the sports facilities. But we also have these lab facilities and we have so
many different technical devices available in our lab facilities that nearly every research question
related to human performance can be answered by use of our technical equipment.
Of course we want the students to be ready for going into a PhD programme afterwards. However next to that they
can go in any field where sport and exercise research is needed, for instance in companies
that are developing sport materials, sports techniques etc. and sport analysing
companies, in sport clubs. You know what we're observing at the moment is that
our students finishing the programmes here are getting into jobs that haven't been existing five
or ten years ago because we do have the technical devices, the technical possibilities today that
games can be analysed in completely different ways, much more sophisticated. And with the knowledge
they gain here they can go directly into these settings and apply that everywhere where
research is needed to make sport better or to make the technical devices or applications
better that are needed in sport. Doors are widely open for the students that are finished here.