Peter Eppinga
Kinesiology
Class of 2006
Peter Eppinga took a chance on UCFV, and it has paid off for him. Eppinga had harboured a dream of
going to medical school and becoming a family physician since he was five years old, and he wasn’t sure that an undergraduate credential from a smaller, more regional institution like UCFV would carry the prestige it would take to get him in the door.
He’s now jumping for joy, having recently received his acceptance letter to UBC medical school for Fall 2006. He credits the excellent education and personalized attention he received from the professors in the UCFV Kinesiology program for his success. “I wasn’t sure a UCFV degree would get me into medical school, but I found out just how prestigious it really was as I went along. My profs were all highly qualified PhDs, and their enthusiasm made me want to come to class. Every single one of them was really with it and exciting, and brought a lot of knowledge to the classroom and the lab.”
Kinesiology is the study of the human body in motion, and it provided a solid grounding for Eppinga.
“I’ve always been fascinated with how the human body works, ever since I got a little illustrated book when I was very young,” he recalls. “I love medicine and the mechanics of the human body.
Eppinga currently lives in Mission and is a Hatzic Secondary graduate. His heritage on his mother’s side is
Haida, and he plans to return to Old Masset in the Queen Charlotte Islands to practice medicine once he qualifies.
He valued the small class sizes at UCFV. “I heard from a friend at a larger university that they were lucky if they got to spend five minutes looking at a specimen under a microscope. It was kind of an assembly-line approach. We had hours to spend in the UCFV labs! And there was a lot of application of textbook learning to real-world applications.”
Eppinga has had a busy five years, working toward his degree while also working as an apartment manager
and maintenance worker for the Mission Native Housing Society and playing soccer for the Mission Football Club. He credits his Christian strong faith for much of his success and for helping him escape from the rebellious lifestyle of his teens. His father, Pastor Gerry Eppinga, runs a ministry for First Nations people.
Eppinga wants to be a proactive doctor with a focus on prevention, and is interested in researching the naturopathic remedies that his Haida grandmother, or Nonnie, talked about to him as a youth. “I’m not interested in only doling out prescriptions. I want to encourage people to live a healthy lifestyle.”
Learn more about UCFV's Kinesiology program at
www.ucfv.ca/kinesiology 
