I was No1 ranked tennis star in whole of US – now I’m an award-winning Harvard physicist in very different career path
ANIA BLESZYNSKI chose split atoms over split steps as she turned her back on a career in tennis.
That is despite being ranked as the No1 Under-18s tennis star in the whole of the US.
And now she is reaping the rewards as an award-winning physicist.
Born to Polish parents in 1976, Bleszynski moved with her physicist parents Elizabeth and Marek to California a year later and grew up in Thousand Oaks.
She excelled in the classroom and on the court and headed off to Stanford University as the top junior in the country.
And she even reached the final of the NCAA singles championship in 1998.
However, Bleszynski only wanted to go pro if she could become one of the very best players in the world, especially as she did not want to spend most of the year travelling around the world.
In reality, her heart was always set on science.
So much so that she would often read between matches and even signed up for a physics class that clashed with tennis practice.
Former Stanford doubles partner and close friend Julie Scott Thu said: “Her parents always put a value on education over tennis from the beginning.
“She had the complete opposite of tennis parents you can imagine, and she benefited from that.”
Bleszynski herself admitted: “I knew I wasn’t going to be a professional tennis player. I didn’t want to just be a Top 70 player.
“I wanted to be a Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert, Steffi Graf, Monica Seles.
“Anything else wasn’t going to do it for me. When I chose to go to college, I knew tennis was finite.”
And it proved a smart choice as her illustrious education and career proves.
Bleszynski initially double majored in mathematics, computational science and physics while also doing research with NASA and gaining recognition for her honors thesis.
She then headed to Harvard where her 2006 PhD thesis was on the complex topic of “Imaging Electrons in Nanoscale Structures” before also going on to study at Yale.
Bleszynski has specialized in novel sensing techniques and quantum mechanical systems and has lectured at the University of California at Santa Barbara since 2010.
Her various awards include the L’Oreal Postdoctoral Fellowship for Women in Science, Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award and the prestigious NSF CAREER Award.
Bleszynski added: “I try to understand how the world works. I try to understand the physical laws of nature, how forces work, how light works.
“What tennis has taught me was absolutely invaluable. You know what it takes to work hard. I have no problem working on something for a week straight.
“There’s also a fierce competitive part of me, but when something happens such as not getting a grant proposal funded, it doesn’t affect me personally. I know how to handle failure.”
However, despite dedicating her life to physics, Bleszynski – now Ania Jayich after getting married and having three children – does still have space in her heart for tennis.
She tries to pick up her racket a couple of times per month.
But that competitive edge means she finds just rallying “boring” so always opts to play a set or two.
No doubt she is still a force to be reckoned with and is a specialist at applying the laws of gravity to make her lobs perfect and land inside the baseline…