Australian Survivor: Blood vs Water has sadly come to an end, and last night’s finale was a nail-biting one. Hailing from the Sunshine Coast, Shayelle LaJoie decided to take part in the gruelling competition, and while she didn’t take home the crown, she still deserves to be commended for making it so far.
The 31-year-old is a biomedical student and yoga instructor and initially joined the show alongside her partner, Ben Watson. Throughout the show, it was her physical strength and ability to be socially adaptable that took her right to the very end.
Despite her best efforts to convince the Jury to pick her as Sole Survivor, the title eventually went to Mark Wales, who is a former alum of the franchise.
But Shay still has so much to look forward to. Speaking to The Latch, she revealed exactly what she plans on doing next, and how her degree is progressing.
“Ooh! I’m just going back to uni, I’m halfway through and I really just want to finish my degree, but if that means every second semester taking it easy and going into a reality show, I’m down for that!
“So, yeah, just finishing my degree and keeping up with my social media, and just doing all the things that I do. Hosting health retreats and … there’s a lot! There’s so much going on in my life but at the end of the day I just need to finish my degree and keep being a nerd!”
Biomed is not an easy subject to study, but thanks to Shay’s ability to plan ahead — and of course her brains — she already has an idea of what her future will look like.
“There are a lot of different avenues I can take, so it’s whether I want to be in research or whether I want to open a clinic. I’ve been debating whether I want to do a Masters in Genetic Therapy, and I’ve also debated doing a research Masters or a PhD,” she said.
“Really, it comes down to the next year of study. I’m currently in my third year, so I think that the next year of certain classes will help me figure out which way I wanna take it, but I am so crazy invested in Nutritional Biochemistry and Epigenetics and how the two have a lot to do with each other and basically, long story short, how our diet and lifestyle choices affect the up-regulating and down-regulating of certain genes and how that can affect our longterm health.”
We’d probably say that studying biomed is harder than the Australian Survivor course, but hey, what do we know.
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