How does a dedicated student, an athlete, decide what to do after graduation?
By Dora Filipovic UA’26 and Jim Stellar
DF is in a quandary. She is a serious athlete, is coming up to graduation, and is looking at Master’s Degree programs in Europe. She has many interests. JS has her in class now twice and we just finished a meeting where we decided together to write this blog about that dilemma.
I (DF) am looking for something into which I can throw myself like I did it with volleyball here at UAlbany and before. Frankly, I have always been good at sports. I enjoy the learning and the skill improvement of volleyball. I enjoy the team and the competition between our team and others. I enjoy the free flow of the game itself, structured by rules and the volleyball court itself. I am looking for that in a career and it is about to become real as I graduate at the end of the coming spring term.
As JS said above, I have always known I wanted to continue my education after I earned a BA, but I spent so much time torn between different paths and programs. I have always been fascinated by the human brain, especially how it makes split second decisions in high pressure situations, of which volleyball is full. In important games, I would often find myself entering a “flow state”, which can best be explained by being in a state of automatic movement. I stop overthinking my moves, and just let my brain make unconscious decisions for me. I started realizing how fascinating that is and that I would love to explore what leads to the brain essentially taking over everything.
JS talked about dopamine a lot in the classes I took with him, which made me interested in its role in cognition and other brain processes. I have also taken Memory and Cognition and Sensation and Perception classes, which further sparked my interest into cognitive neuroscience. In the past, I always saw myself as a sports psychologist working with athletes to overcome performance issues and deal with injuries, but I realized that I would be more fulfilled doing research and learning more about the organ in charge of everything.
I (JS) love the analogy between the flow state in volleyball and the same in work in an intellectual field. I think we are in agreement that flow can happen in neuroscience, at least it has happened to me for more than 50 years since I first started graduate school in 1972. So, I hope the same is true for DF. As her professor and mentor, I think it is my job to try to help that career flow come true for her. But first, what is a flow state and how does it relate to dopamine? Then we can talk about why it is such a good insight when undergraduates are contemplating what to do with their careers after college.
While the phenomenon of flow has been known for a long time, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is credited with developing the concept. As the link above puts it succinctly “people are happiest when they are in a state of flow—a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation.” You can explore the link to learn more or look at a link to an older blog based on the book Drive by Daniel Pink.
What we really want to discuss here from a brain perspective is how flow is an essential part of the motor system, and by extension the cognitive system. This idea is represented in a recent article on dopamine (and norepinephrine) neurotransmitters in flow, that also talks about brain networks such as the default mode network. To stay with dopamine, it is well known to underlie the neuropathology of Parkinson’s disease that is characterized by a lack of motor initiation, perhaps the opposite of flow in volleyball. It is also well known to underlie rewarding experiences such as big ones like taking cocaine or perhaps small ones like the so-called dopamine hits that come from doom scrolling on social media. Thus dopamine is involved in both movement and reward. Both movement and reward are mediated by midbrain systems. But the largest subject of this entire blog series (and our fascination here) is how they underlie the cognitive systems of planning. We see a similarity in terms of how to position oneself in a volleyball game, e.g. to make a score, and how to position oneself in a career path, e.g. how to go to graduate school after college. Could the cognitive planning for each be looking for the flow characteristic in both of those planning operations?
I (DF), in my further studies, want to focus on how dopamine affects flow state, performance, and other daily functions. As the key article cited above mentions, flow is likely when there is a match between a person’s skills and the task challenge. When a person is a beginner in something, they are often cautious every step of the way, recalling what they were taught by someone and rarely relying on their own instinct or experience. Once they get more comfortable with the task, flow slowly starts to creep in and takes over some, if not all basic functions. For me, in volleyball it happens when I “go through the motions” and put trust into what I know I can do well, while for professor Stellar it likely happens when he talks about dopamine and reward pathways, in which he is an expert.
I hope that by furthering my education with a neuroscience master’s degree, I can also start reaching flow state when discussing some complex brain functions and ultimately connect my athletic experience with my academic one. My journey as a student athlete taught me a lot about discipline, hard work, and dedication, which I am ready to transfer from the court into a lab. Finding that sweet spot between mastery and challenge has always given me a rush, and I am very excited to learn the neurobiological components of performance.
