Home : Volume 32 : Winter 2006
Soccer standout's goal is BME degree

Lynn Murray (Larger image.)

Almost from the time, at age 7, that she started kicking a soccer ball around with the 11-year-old boys in her Marietta, Georgia, neighborhood, Lynn Murray has been earning accolades for her play.

She began her formal soccer career on mighty mites and rec league teams. At age 10, she joined a touring team; a year later, she joined the United Quest Red 85's, the competitive club she played with for eight years. During that time, she was most valuable team player for three years and a Gatorade state player of the year. Murray helped her club win four Snickers Georgia State Cup championships and participated in the U.S. under-19 national team camp and on under-17 and under-18 Olympic Development Program teams.

Now a college sophomore, Murray has started as goalkeeper for the UW-Madison women's soccer team for all but a couple of games. In her freshman year, she recorded 87 saves—fifth-most by a UW-Madison goalkeeper in a season — and made the Soccer Buzz All-Great Lakes freshman team and the Big Ten all-freshman team. “We've had a pretty good tradition of strong female goalkeepers here, and she's one of those that wants to follow in that path, and wants to be known as one of the top keepers at Wisconsin,” says UW women's soccer Coach Dean Duerst.

Murray's passion for soccer runs so deep that she would jump at the chance to play on the U.S. Olympic team, yet she chose to attend UW-Madison, in part, because it offers a bachelor's degree in biomedical engineering.

Lynn Murray (Larger image.)

In Marietta, she attended Wheeler High School, a science, math and technology magnet school. At some point, she took a robotics class, which she characterizes as “applied physics,” and became interested in developing prosthetics and artificial limbs and hearts. “I started researching what was going to let me do that,” says Murray. “It's really neurology, which is never offered as an undergraduate major, or it's biomedical engineering, which is the best way to get into neurology.”

As a sophomore, Murray is getting a taste of biomedical engineering in her hands-on design course, BME 200. For client Dick Keller of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin-based Bruno Independent Living Aids, she and classmates Cara Dunn, Nipun Yamdagni and Jamie Brown are refining the design of a handheld “pendant,” which people with mobility disabilities can use to operate stairway chairlifts, automotive wheelchair lifts and other accessibility aids. “Since I've been here, I've found so many other areas of biomedical engineering that I really like learning about,” she says. “And so I really like the design class because it gives you an opportunity to see what projects that you will be dealing with.”

Lynn Murray (Larger image.)

Murray's other courses include introductory biology for pre-med students (zoology 151), introduction to organic chemistry (chemistry 343), and American history from the Civil War to the present (history 102), an online course. “I took it because you can listen to the lectures on the road,” she says.

Using precious slivers of time — like bus trips to away games — to catch up on coursework is important to Murray's academic success. During the soccer season, her daily schedule demands a five-hour team commitment (including treatment for some knee problems, practice, and lifting weights or watching game video), plus two games each weekend. Every other week, the team plays on the road, so Murray must squeeze all of her classes, meetings with professors, homework, and BME design team meetings into the little spare time she has left.

Most of the time, she has little trouble balancing soccer with the engineering that Duerst, her coach, calls her “other life.” There are periods of stress in each — particularly for the goalkeeper of a team that's hit a losing streak. “We had kind of a rough patch in the middle of the season where we were losing every game in overtime,” she says. “I think six of our nine losses this year were in overtime. So it was very frustrating and very heartbreaking and for a while, we really got down on ourselves.”

But everyone in athletics has obstacles to deal with, says Murray, a fierce competitor who takes the team's struggles to heart. “It's really difficult, and even if your team is having a bad season, and even if you don't want to be there, you still have practice every day and you still have games every weekend that you're responsible to be at,” she says.

She is equally committed to engineering and knows it's one step on the way to her educational goals, which for the near term include a research position in a faculty laboratory, and eventually, graduate school in neurology. “You really do have to switch back and forth between them and it's difficult, but at the same time, I really love both of them and I would never want to give one up for the other — and I hope I never have to,” says Murray. “So I'm willing to put the effort in. It's exhausting, but at the end of the day, it's really worth it.”

Content by perspective@engr.wisc.edu

Date last modified: 03-Feb-2006
Date created: 03-Feb-2006

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