Jio Chang, Colorado College, Women's Swimming

JIO CHANGE OF COLORADO COLLEGE, a senior on the women's swimming and diving team from Moraga, Calif., has been selected the SCAC Character & Community Female Student-Athlete of the Week for the week beginning March 2.

The SCAC Character & Community award honors the efforts of student-athletes who excel in the field of athletics, and also serve their campus and community.



Jio has been an outstanding leader on the swim team, including serving a team captain in 2019-20, but she is just as proud, if not prouder, of the work she does around campus and in the community.

Chang, from Moraga, Calif., is the co-chair of the Korean-American Student Association at CC and a peer intern at the school’s Career Center.

“I joined KASA because I thought it was important to have that kind of community on campus,” Chang said.

She not only leads bi-weekly meetings to foster a student community, but has organized collaborations with the Air Force Academy and UCCS, including campus-wide events like a KASA Formal and Asian Cultures Night.

“I struggled here my first couple of years, especially coming from such a diverse place as the Bay Area,” Chang added. “I felt alone a lot of the time, but felt much more comfortable at the meetings and dinners, and wanted that for the underclassmen from the start, since I didn’t find it until halfway through college.”

Outside of the school, Chang has been an ambassador for “Swim Across America.” Last summer, she led a group of five CC swimmers that raised money during an open-water swim at Chatfield Reservoir in Denver. The group secured more than $7,000 for Acute Myeloid Leukemia research at Children’s Hospital in Denver. AML starts in the bone marrow (the soft inner part of certain bones, where new blood cells are made), but most often it quickly moves into the blood, as well.

Despite being a full-time Division III athlete, Chang has had several opportunities to travel abroad during her time at CC, thanks to the block plan, where students take one class at a time and finish a semester’s worth of work in three and a half weeks.

During her freshman year at CC, she spent two blocks studying the Chinese language at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. Her favorite trip, however, was a week-long research journey to Los Angeles and Hong Kong, visiting the Disneyland in each place while studying the “Subjective Notions of Happiness.”

Chang, a molecular biology major with a 3.67 grade-point average, is fluent in Korean, and has a working proficiency in Mandarin Chinese.

In the pool, Chang produced 23 all-conference swims during her career at the SCAC Championships. She collected 11 second-place finishes and 12 third-place results at the SCAC Championships in her four years. As a freshman, she broke the school record in the 200-yard freestyle when she led off the 800-yard freestyle relay with a split of 1:54.93, a mark that still stands in the record book.

Throughout her career, she was named the team’s Most Valuable Swimmer (2019), Rookie of the Year (2017), a five-time SCAC Women's Swimmer of the Week, and is a member of the Schlessman Natatorium-record 800 free relay team.

Despite all those honors, perhaps her best swimming performance came at this year’s SCAC Championships. Nearly a month prior to the conference meet, she suffered an accident while riding her scooter on campus and landed squarely on her face, losing most of her front four teeth. Following three oral surgeries and two root canals, Chang finished in the top eight in her three individual events, top three in all five relays and posted three personal-best times at the SCAC Championships.

Chang hopes to turn her molecular biology degree into a career in healthcare technology. She wants to improve the experience for patients in the United States using patient-focused care as opposed to the current model of profit-focused care.