Jocelyn Pellerin ’21, Health Science and Psychology

A strong player on her high school basketball team, Jocelyn’s path to NVU began when she was recruited in her junior year. Johnson Women’s Basketball Coach Greg Eckman made a real impression on Jocelyn, and she was impressed with the personal attention. “No other coaches wrote personal notes on the recruiting letters they sent,” she said. “I decided I really wanted to play for him.”

Now in her senior year as a double major in Health Science and Psychology, with concentrations in both Health and Exercise Science and Health and Sport Psychology, the Keene, New Hampshire native’s next step on her career path is starting to take form.

Informed in part by her role as a new mother with a 6-month-old daughter, Jocelyn’s initial plans include working for women’s health or with kids — as an advocate for women with Planned Parenthood, for instance, or a behavioral interventionist with kids in need of support.

Jocelyn has some long-range plans, too, with a master’s degree in either public health or occupational therapy in her future. A summer internship with an occupational therapist who worked in both a school setting and her own practice opened this door to her. “It was really good to see both avenues” of this work, she said.

Her senior research project will bring the public health/nutrition part of her coursework to life when Jocelyn works with Dr. Emily Tarleton, who is also her advisor, in a study that will assess falls risk and nutrition status in older Vermonters. It’s a topic that is personally interesting to Jocelyn as well. Her 90-year-old grandmother fell recently and broke her neck, “but she healed well,” Jocelyn said. She takes good care of herself, and it will be interesting to see these connections in the research, she added.

These connections between health and science informed her choice of major, too. “I always had a passion for helping people; when my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer, I knew I wanted to go into the medical field,” Jocelyn said.

Of NVU-Johnson, Jocelyn says she has loved the campus and the community feel from the start. “My advisors have been super helpful about everything, from classes to more personal help — which I wouldn’t have received at a bigger school. Here, I’m not just a number.”