BOULDER – Colorado soccer embarks on its final regular season match with a visit to Utah on Friday. The Buffaloes will look to pick up a third consecutive win and continue to push for a spot in the upcoming NCAA Tournament field.
One Buff who will not be present in Salt Lake City on Friday is fifth-year graduate student Jade Babcock-Chi. Unfortunately, an untimely knee injury cut Babcock-Chi’s season and her collegiate career short this season, having undergone surgery and missing the final five matches of 2023.
Her teammates have joked with her over the last five seasons, calling her an ‘astronaut’ or a ‘rocket scientist’ as a nod to her undergraduate degree and current pursuit of a master’s in Aerospace Engineering. And it’s with good reason.
Babcock-Chi graduated with her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering with a minor in Computer Science in 2023 and is currently continuing her accelerated M.S. in Aerospace Engineering with a focus in Astrodynamics and Satellite Navigation (ASN).
She is one of three of CU’s 382 student-athletes in the program this year.
“People definitely just assume I do rocket science,” Babcock-Chi joked. “I think that’s maybe like 5% of what it is. But it’s a majority of a lot of other things like electronics, coding, orbits and things like that. It’s not just rockets. It’s satellites. It’s planes. It’s self-driving cars.”
If it sounds like a lot it is because it is.
“I came in with a lot of credits for high school,” she explained. “That enabled me to basically bypass all my electives. I was doing research and I saw that there was an option to do a computer science minor, so I started off with that. That double counts for my major and then I realized I’m still going to be lacking in credits so I thought I would try out the accelerated master’s program called bachelor’s accelerated master’s (BAM). That enabled me to do like 40% of my masters during the last year of undergrad and then finish the rest off in a year.”
Juggling a full class load and Division I sport is a challenge that many outside of collegiate athletics won’t fully grasp. But to carry a high GPA in a such demanding program, while playing DI soccer is taking it to another level.
“It’s definitely been tough,” Babcock-Chi expressed. “I think people don’t really understand sometimes how much time…
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