Conor Whelan

PhD.

Yes, I've done a Master's in Psychology first and then I just finished up a PhD in Mental Health and Wellbeing of Elite Gaelic Game Student Athletes.

So anyone who is a full-time student but is on a senior inter-county panel.

So I researched the kind of dual career strains they have between balancing academia and sport and then I designed a mentor and intervention to try and support them in

their college life.

Number one thing is complete misalignment between your sporting institution and your academic institution.

So your academia's objective is to educate you.

This is your timetable, this is what you're doing.

Your sporting calendar says you're training here, here and here.

and you have your two weekly timetables there's no communication between those two stakeholders and the student athlete is in the middle and they have to figure out okay I'm not gonna go to my lecture here because I'm going down training in Galway this evening I need to be gone by four o'clock because traffic's bad and they basically don't align at all and the result of it is

The student athlete is in the middle and they're just left to manage it themselves, really.

So that's the number one challenge, I suppose, really.

Um, yeah, I just think I'm a fairly curious person.

So I was always kind of fascinated with the psychological aspect of both life and sport and all that.

And just decided I'd do that and learn as much as I could about it.

I'd be fairly open to learning and be curious that way.

And then I was like, I always kind of wanted to do, I felt that because

Because I was so interested in the mind and the psychology of it, and then I had a first cousin that passed away from suicide, I felt that I kind of had been pushed into a role where I was being asked about mental health and that sort of space, and I kind of felt that if I am in that space, I'd like to be the most knowledgeable I possibly could be.

I felt that...

And this is no disrespect, but I felt some people were offering offer advice on mental health that's very, how should I say, not research based or not.