Graduate students joined together last weekend at the inaugural Allied Health Games for friendly competitive games, organized by the School of Health Professions.

The games brought together different institutions including
students from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB), along with different schools around campus.

“It was nice being able to interact with other students that are not directly in the graduate school and be able to socialize with other people,” said Angie Salinas, a graduate student in the Integrated Biomedical Sciences (IBMS) program.

In addition to encouraging team building and fostering camaraderie, Salinas felt that the games were a great place for networking.

“Since I do intramural events, I see a lot of students playing volleyball at the court, but I never really knew what they did, and today
I got to see that they were part of the Physical Therapy (PT) program or the Occupational Therapy (OT) program,” Salinas said. “It’s nice to learn what they do in reference to school.”

The games were divided into morning and afternoon events. Morning games included volleyball, sack race, egg spoon race, tug of war, rock- paper-scissors, along with a watermelon eating contest. Afternoon games included
basketball, dodgeball, a three-legged-race, water balloon toss and a final relay
event.

Aaron Marks Horning, a graduate student in the Cellular and Structural Biology program, explained that his favorite part of the day
was the relay race.

“Everyone was super amped and it really felt like a team activity,” Horning said.

Horning felt that one of the reasons that the graduate
school team won third place at tug of war was because of our strategy.

“We had the right rhythm. We executed the pulling-on-rhythm strategy and the other school couldn’t compete,” Horning said.

Salinas said that she was really happy our team won, but it was a surprise at the time.

“At first you could feel that we weren’t moving and then suddenly we felt like we were losing and in a blink of an eye, we were suddenly moving backwards and we were winning,” Salinas said. “It’s a rush, it’s a big rush
where you hear people yelling at you and all you can think about is the person in front of you and the person behind you and hopefully they don’t fall on you.”

Salinas explained that she is excited for next year’s Allied Health Games and hopes that more graduate students will participate.

“It was fun and it got us to move around,” Salinas said. “We spend a lot of time in the lab not interacting with people and this was a good
way to get a little exercise in, but also distract yourself and let your brain relax, not only physically but just to give your brain a break.”

To see photos from the Allied Health Games, click here.