The SLP Thing

The short and sweet version of this story revolves around the notion of sometimes you start going down one path determined that’s the one you’re meant for, and you wind up on a path you never even knew existed. That was speech for me.

Speech-Language Pathology was the last career I ever expected. Partially because before I stumbled upon it while perusing minor categories in college, I had no idea it even existed. For those of you who don’t know what it entails, I’ll sum it up for you: we speech therapists who have decided to torture ourselves with grad school and earned ourselves a masters, treat individuals, anywhere from birth to the last days of life, in the area of communication.

In case you ever wanted to know, “communication” can be verbal, non-verbal, supported by anything from pictures to devices; “communication” means not just expressing something, but understanding as well, and the SLP profession targets so many areas that you may never think go under our scope of practice, but they do. It’s not just teaching kiddos to talk, or helping someone regain their speech and language after a stroke, it’s treating swallowing, voice, cognition; it’s working in the NICU with babies who need help learning to feed, it’s counseling family members on how to help their loved ones get the best quality of life when it’s impacted by dementia. It’s one of the most amazing fields with an endless array of options in which to specialize, provides the opportunity to work with individuals across the lifespan, allows for collaborating with amazing clients, families, and professionals, and makes some of the hardest days life throws at you, some of the most cherished.

Like I mentioned earlier, sometimes we end up on paths we never even knew existed. When I first entered college, I intended to pursue Photojournalism, and here it is my 7th year in my school district working in speech-language, where four were served as an assistant, and the last three have been as a post-grad SLP. I look forward to the adventures on which this career continues to take me, and am thankful for the flexibility it allows me to still pursue the other things I love in life!

To find out more about those other things, check out the rest of the site…