Jessica Tinney, a Q Facilities employee at the Athletics and Recreation Centre and fourth-year Kinesiology Student, will be competing for Canada at the World Para Swimming Championships later this month in Portugal.

She qualified for the World Para Swimming Championships after competing in the Canadian trials and breaking the national record in individual medley. Tinney, who traveled to Europe ahead of the Championships earlier this week, said her success hasn't fully hit her yet.

"I don't know if I ever had a time where, this is 100 per cent what I'm doing," Tinney told GoGaelsGo.com. "Even when it happened and I had the email saying, 'You're going to Portugal, congrats!' It just never hit me."

Tinney, who has cerebral palsy, has been swimming for most of her life and started competing when she was 13 years old. While she said the impact of the moment may not have hit her yet, she is excited to be able to compete for Canada.

"It's an honour to wear that maple leaf and represent Canada. Again, I don't know if it's entirely hit me yet. The clothing was sent to me, and I saw my name on a swim cap and that started to set in a little bit more."

Swimming is just one of the things on Tinney's very full schedule. Along with being a world-class competitor in the pool and training eight times a week, she is also a full-time Kinesiology student at Queen's - and will be celebrating convocation shortly after the World Para Swimming Championships, works on the Q Facilities staff at the ARC, and is a research assistant.

"Yeah, a little bit of a full plate," Tinney laughed. "How you balance it all is really the million-dollar question. I really don't know how I did. And I don't think I realized how much I was doing until people asked, 'you just you swim, right?' And I said, 'Yes, but then I also have two jobs. I'm also a full-time student.' I honestly couldn't tell you how I managed to pull that off, but I liked everything I was doing."

Tinney said one key aspect of balancing her schedule, and getting the most out of her training in the pool, is to fully focus on the task in front of her.

"I'll never put 50 per cent of effort into anything; I always like to dive in. I will give myself to whatever I'm doing. You can't really do that if you're not in the moment of doing things. In school, I was 100 per cent writing that paper or studying for that test. If I was hanging out with my friends, cooking a meal at our house, I was doing that and I wasn't worried about other things. I don't think you can really accomplish everything you want to at your best if you weren't in that moment, 100 per cent focused, giving yourself to what you are doing no matter what it is."
 
Tinney is graduating this year after four years at Queen's, and while she said she hasn't had much time to think about her future career plans, she knows she wants to do something where she's helping other people. She said it was exciting to see how closely her field of study – Kinesiology – connected with her passion for swimming at times.
 
"My life kind of revolves around sport, apparently, and everything to do with movement. It was really interesting for me to see some of my course content, talk about high performance sport, and para sport and to hear a professor talking about that and to have actually lived that experience and to find the connections and reflect on my sporting path and all of the things that I did when I was younger and I'm doing now."
 
Before that however, Tinney has some more immediate goals. The World Para Swimming Championships take place from June 12-18 in Madeira, Portugal. Tinney said she's hoping to continue improving on the times she's set so far in the pool.

"World Championships, I want to perform really well and make some more best times and see what happens from there. I do want to keep improving after World Championships, I don't want to peak there. And I do want to represent Canada again, whether that'd be a future World Championships or a Paralympics.