Imagine you were a football player good enough to make the NFL. Imagine you are also a mathematician good enough to get a doctorate from MIT. Which path would you choose?
It was the decision faced by John Urschel who first started playing football at Canisius High School, the Jesuit high school in Buffalo, New York. He got good pretty quickly, and he’s a big dude.
John ended up getting a scholarship to play football at Penn State, where he could also pursue studies in math, which was his first love. He ended up with a bachelor’s and master’s degree while starring on the offensive line at Penn State. And after his time there finished, he was drafted into the NFL by the Baltimore Ravens. As he embarked on his NFL career, he also enrolled as a doctoral student in mathematics at MIT. After three years in the league, he retired from football to start a career as a math professor, also at MIT.
