I had a great time interviewing Dr. Tom Campbell, Ph.D, LAT, ATC, and highly appreciate him for letting me stop by to interview him. Dr. Campbell is an Athletic Trainer at Old Dominion University, he works with a lot of the athletes on campus and enjoys the bonds he created with each and everyone of them. As we were talking, he explained his inspiration was him growing up as an athlete and being involved in a sports medicine class that his high school’s athletic trainer taught. He first came to college as a business major but changed his mind to an athletic training major and fell in love with it. He did his first 8 year of college at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania and attended Old Dominion University for his Ph.D. Dr. Campbell’s say the biggest challenge of the profession is there is still people out there who don’t know what athletic training is. Athletic Training is a qualified medical profession that manages, diagnosis, and prevents a wide variety of injuries and conditions. He states the difference between PT and AT, PT; you’re going to see a more variety of patients of all ages, AT works with more younger, healthy and physically active individuals. They may see similar patients but PT will see different types than AT. We also discussed the role and responsibilities as an AT, He says it depends on the setting, due to the fact AT is moving from a lot of different settings. Dr. Campbell shares that AT are in the military, hospital, NASA, amazon and on the side line at games. Each setting may differ but in general, the major role is preventing injuries but if the injure does happen they have to be able to diagnose it and manage it so they can be put through rehab to a normal state. I asked him about his research one of his colleagues talked about and how it came about. He said he was always interested in concussion and a few years back he seen an article. It talked about there’s a potential link that there are certain things in your saliva to be able to diagnose a patient with concussion and determine where they’re at in terms of when to come back to play. So, he reached out to the author of the paper, scheduled a meeting and now they’ve been working together ever since then. Dr. Campbell’s advice to upcoming health care professions is to get experience of your professions of interest. Since, there are so many he recommend shadowing which ever ones you are interested in and can see yourself pursuing in the future.