Speech Pathologist, Palm Desert, CA
Describe your career. What do you do for a living?
I am a speech-language pathologist. I work with with children in preschool through elementary school to develop their speech, language, and communication skills. I identify children who have communication disorders in the school setting then provide treatment/therapy. I am also an advocate for my students and provided education to teachers, staff, and family members.
As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
When I was little I wanted to be a zoo keeper, but then I realized it involved cleaning up after the animals! Jokes aside, I knew I wanted to work in special education because I enjoyed helping my mom out at work with her students. She was an adaptive PE teacher.
What was your path like to get to where you are in your career?
I studied communication disorders for three years in under grad. Then I got my masters degree in speech language pathology.
Can you walk us through your typical day of work?
A typical day at work involves planning out lessons in the morning and prepping all the materials I need for the days. Then I see small groups of students for therapy throughout the day, usually about 10 different groups of kids. If I have some free time in between groups I usually am testing/evaluating or observing students. At the end of the day I complete medical billing, write reports and IEPs, complete paperwork, and I usually have an IEP meeting after school.
What do you enjoy most about your career?
I think I enjoy the problem solving aspects of the job. When a kid has that “ah ha” moment of feeling like they can successfully communicate, it really brings joy to my life! I also just love building connections with the kids.
What did you study? How much schooling do you think is required to get into your role? What could you have skipped?
Well for my profession there is quite a bit of schooling involved and you must get your master’s degree to be licensed. In addition there are lots of training hours, internships, and exams. Although it’s a long road, I think it was all very necessary. I learned a by completing training hours in different settings.
What tools/resources do you love/frequently use?
Due to my high caseload, I use a lot of resources to help me be more efficient with my time. One of them being a transcription feature to help me with transcribing audio recordings. I also subscribe to a monthly lesson plan services to reduce the amount of time I need to spend planning therapy activities.
The iPad is a high tech communication device that kids would use to communicate if they had difficulty communicating verbally- the device has speech output (so they press the button and it says the word aloud). The binder is a low tech communication book which also helps kids to communicate but they would point to the pictures to communicate their needs (e.g. point to the “more” picture to ask for more of something).
What advice would you give to someone who is trying to figure out what they want to do?
Find something you are truly interested in and will never get tired of learning about.
Allison was featured in The World of Speech Pathology Podcast
If you weren’t in your current career path, what would you be doing? And/Or What is next for you in the future?
In my future I see myself owning my own speech therapy business. I would love to have a small amount of clients that I could really focus my attention on and design programs that could impact their lives as a whole.