Whether as a recruited track and field athlete or vice president of Trinity University Motorsports, Kaelin Leishman, sophomore engineering science major, has always been on the fast track of life. She’s been running for as long as she can remember, but her proudest moments come from being a part of Trinity’s track and field team.
“Last spring we went to the conference meet,” Leishman said. “There, the last event is always the four-by-four, which is just the relay, but our team — the girls — won the relay, and then the guys won the relay, and then that ended up with us winning the whole meet. That was a really fun experience — all of us celebrating together.”
Leishman has had success after success as part of the team, but she has had numerous individual wins too.
“I was running a race for cross country, and I was in the open section, so not the varsity race, and I was supposed to get fifth or something, but I ended up getting first,” Leishman said. “I just remember being really proud of myself for that because this isn’t my strong suit, but I was just happy that I got through it despite it being hard.”
Leishman’s passion for running led her to another passion — engineering. Leishman finds joy in working with her hands and problem-solving, and she found a way to unite the two through biomedical engineering prosthetics.
“I read a book when I was really little called ‘The Running Dream,’” Leishman said. “I liked running, and it was about this girl who lost her leg in an accident and her story. It’s my favorite book, and I like the idea of helping people, and it still being something I’m interested in. It’s a physical thing that I can work on that helps people. That’s what I like about it.”
Helping people is something that Leishman has a lot of experience with. A self-described empath, Leishman has a unique insight into other people that allows her to see things others don’t.
“I very much pick up on other people’s emotions and how they’re responding to certain situations where not everyone else does,” Leishman said. “That definitely affects how I go about my daily life and how I interact with people. I think that would be interesting to explain to people because I know not everybody thinks the same way that I do.”
If Leishman could give just one piece of advice, it would be this:
“If you have a problem or a friend issue or something along those lines and you can’t imagine it bothering you two or three weeks from now or however long, it’s not actually as big of a deal as it seems in the moment,” Leishman said. “I think it’s more like if you take a step back from your problems, you’ll realize that they’re not as big as they seem.”
