Senior Ayla Abbasi completes a dive at a meet. Abbasi said she aims to complete as much of her homework as possible during school in order to balance her difficult coursework with her practice schedule. (Submitted: Ayla Abbasi)

How do you divide your time up between school and diving?

I do a lot of my homework during  SRT and during school, so that when I get home I can go to practice and not have too much work to do after during the free time that I have. l make sure that I do my homework and I don’t procrastinate things, and then I do a lot on the weekends.

How do you balance extracurricular commitments outside of diving, like being a commended graduate, with diving?

I try to do things that fit into school hours, because I have practice every day after school. I pick activities that meet in the morning so that I can still go to practice after school, and I make sure that any clubs or any extracurriculars that I do don’t interfere with my practice timings.

When did you start diving?

I started diving in 8th grade after I quit gymnastics, because I still wanted to do a sport and diving and gymnastics are really similar. So I started diving and I ended up really liking it, so I continued.

What’s your favorite thing about diving?

My favorite part about diving is probably my teammates, because we spend a lot of time together, and l’ve become really close friends with all my teammates. It’s fun getting to go somewhere after school with all your friends.

What was your college recruitment process like?

I started looking for colleges to dive at the summer after my junior year because that’s when I figured out that I wanted to start diving in college, and I just started reaching out to coaches, and eventually, I found a school that I liked the academics of as well as the athletics, and that’s how I ended up choosing what school I was going to dive at, which is Colgate.

What about diving in college at Colgate excites you most?

I’m excited to dive in college because I want to compete at college meets, because the environment’s really fun and there’s a lot of really good divers to compete against.

What will the change be like from high school to college meets?

I feel like it’ll be different because balancing school with diving in college is going to be a lot harder than it was in high school, because there’s a lot more work from classes. I’m a little bit nervous about balancing school and diving in college.