Privilege, Passion, and Possibilities

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Privilege, Passion, and Possibilities While speaking of his recent Joseph Kennedy biography The Patriarch, author David Nasaw stated that Kennedy continually impressed upon his children that those who ‘are privileged with money, with education, with good looks, have to give something back to those who don't have those privileges.’ Although my own father has been dead for over 25 years that is the same message that I heard from him and perhaps even more importantly that was how he lived his own life, figuring out how he could use his own talents and abilities to make a difference in his community. My father was also like Joseph Kennedy in that my dad was great at making money and time and time again he invested that money not only in his companies but in the community. I never had my dad’s money-making talent, but I had other talents and heard dad’s message that I was to use those talents for not only my own family but for my community. So my service philosophy is rooted in the words and actions of my dad, as well as the privilege that I enjoyed because of my dad and mother’s efforts. Although a service philosophy of ‘if you could, you should’ might be appropriate, I determined very early in life that I needed passion to fire my actions and ‘should’ is not consistent with passion. I have always been passionate about being a scientist and being physically active, so my career as an exercise physiologist has been the perfect opportunity to be passionate about what I do. In fact, being an exercise physiologist in a university community has also afforded me numerous possibilities for making a difference in all sorts of communities. Thus, my philosophy of service flows from three themes: privilege, passion, and possibilities. It is these three themes that have influenced me over the 40 years of my academic career. As an exercise physiologist it has been

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