For junior finance major and sport management minor Aiden Potoczniak, sports are more than a hobby or pastime. As a club soccer player and lifelong fan of the game, Potoczniak sees sports as a service, a way to give back to others and his passion.
“I played sports my entire life. I actually came into Trinity trying out for the soccer team,” Potoczniak said. “Unfortunately, I didn’t make the team. That kind of allowed me to take a step back and play club, but also just be able to study sport and understand it on a more societal level and kind of get a better understanding of it and of the root of it — what makes it tick. I’ve always enjoyed sports: soccer, baseball, big Astros fan, Liverpool fan as well in England … always had a knack for it, and was like, why not minor in it?”
Potoczniak is pairing sport management with a major in finance, which he sees as the best of both worlds between people and numbers. Potoczniak’s passion for finance led him to become co-founder of a club, Advocates for Opportunities in Finance, which he hopes will give more people interested in finance access to internships and full-time offers.
In addition to being the co-founder of Advocates for Opportunities, Potoczniak is also the alumni chair of his fraternity, Chi Delta Tau. Additionally, he spends time working as a facility monitor at the William H. Bell Center and as a philanthropy officer for the Phonathon program where he connects with potential Trinity donors.
“You spend three hours talking to either parents or alumni, building rapport, seeing what they’re doing now,” Potoczniak said.
“We’ll see even for parents what their kids are doing now and what they’re studying and their aspirations — building rapport and hopefully at the end of that call, trying to help them give back to Trinity. … It’s a lot of fun — the whole interaction-based part of it, over the phone and learning about other people. There’s a lot that I’ve learned in these conversations and just seeing where people have started out — what their major was and how they do something that’s completely different than what they studied, and it’s always fun to hear those kinds of stories.”
Getting to study a variety of topics is part of what makes Trinity special for Potoczniak. One of his favorite Trinity memories comes from when he took SPAN 2301 with Carlos Velez Salas and got to participate in a group project like no other.
“There’s a project where you have a presentation of performance, because this class is very performative-based, and we were teamed up with a group of five or six of us,” Potoczniak said. “And we somehow were able to put together a play [in which] I was Donald Trump, my friend Ben was the president of Mexico, AMLO, and then we had Amber Heard and Johnny Depp and we also had narrators and then we ended up performing a rap song with a dance. It was the craziest thing ever. That was probably something that I’ll never forget.”
After Trinity, Potoczniak hopes to go into commercial and industrial real estate, a decision aided by his experiences interning with Levey Group over the summer. He takes inspiration from his father and grandfather, who was an executive in the oil and gas industry.
If Potoczniak could give one piece of advice to his past self, it would be this:
“Enjoy it,” Potoczniak said. “You know, with more age and more time comes more responsibility. So just enjoying the time where I had less responsibility. It’s easier said than done, of course, but just enjoying the time and not caring as much about what other people think and focusing on yourself and then focusing on the people that you’re close to as well.”
