Christian Brown

Christian Brown is a stunning athlete. Not content with just one sport at Princeton, he leaves the football field after the fall season to enter the realm of Track and Field where he is just as dominant. In the 2022 indoor season Christian broke the Ivy league record in the 60 meter hurdles and backed it up by storming to victory at the Ivy League Heptagonal Championships. In this episode we spoke about how he perceives his role as a student athlete, and what it takes to keep up with all of his commitments. Christian is a champ in both his sports, and well worth listening to, get stuck in!

What We Talked About and Why it Matters

Christian is a remarkable human being. His capacity to be carry out a rigidly disciplined approach to excellent academic and athletic achievement, all the while working towards his goal of being a doctor is demonstrative of his capacity to thrive in pressure filled environments. Christian was the only one of my guests who understood his identity as a student athlete at Princeton not as the fulfilment of two jobs, but rather that being a student athlete is one role, the completion of which being dependent of how well you are doing in both. Christian is of course doing well in both and as many accolades to his name both in the realms of Football/Track and Field and his classwork. He has the kind of dedication to producing great sporting performances that can be silently  intimidating for those who not possess similar levels of commitment to combined athletic and academic success. What often strikes me as interesting about the status of student athlete is that it is assumed that every athlete is perfect across sport and academics at all times. Of course, this is the goal for most, but the perception created that athletes should be able to execute to the best of their abilities at all times can put pressure on student athletes to attempt to do too much, in too little time.

Even Christian, who fulfils his role beautifully, described a steep learning curve in learning how to deal with the pressure at Princeton. His years as an underclassmen were difficult, and were undoubtedly part of a process in which he was taught and learned the discipline needed to stay viable as a student athlete. Of course you could argue possibly rightly, that this discipline will serve him well in life as he leave the realm of the student athlete for the professional world. However, I wish to highlight the fact that it is student athletes in particular who are being taught this lesson, whilst outsiders levy charges of the group as a whole being unfit to attend the university on the account of being less capable than others. It is this reason that a handful of my interviewees described feeling impostor syndrome at Princeton.