Earning a Degree While Earning Gold Medals: Freestyle Skier Jennifer Heil

Freestyle skier and Olympian, Jennifer Heil, has had twenty-five victories at the World Championships, and earned Canada’s first Olympic gold in women's moguls, but her most recent accomplishment is graduating from the Commerce program at McGill University. You will come across a McGill alum who holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics more often than you come across an alum with her credentials.  She made sure to mention the caveat that she took slightly longer than four years to complete her B.Com, but she definitely deserves some slack – she managed to win four World Cup titles in a row while enrolled at McGill.

... Growing up in the Prairies, Jennifer began skiing competitively at only twelve years old.  Her family drove her eight hours every weekend so that she could ski for the provincial team. That’s truly the dedication of a budding Olympic athlete.  After graduating high school, Jennifer competed in her first Olympics at the age of eighteen.  Despite experiencing Olympic glory, Jennifer felt like she was missing out on something all teenagers look forward to: life as a university student.She had always been excited about going to university, yet while her friends were applying to schools she was prepping for the Olympics, putting school temporarily on the back burner. After missing a medal by one one-hundredth of a point, and experiencing multiple injuries, Jennifer decided to refocus.

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