Interview w/ Grad Student... Soon to be SLP!

Within my online interview with Nicole Freeberg, a graduate student who is soon to be a Speech Language Pathologist, I asked four questions with hopes to learn more about the schooling process and the career as a whole. The questions I asked consisted of;

#1 What advice do you have that could help someone get into grad school?

#2 What are you looking forward to most within the career to Speech Pathology?

#3 What do you see as the cons of Speech Pathology?

#4 Did you always know that you wanted to work in the school setting?

#1 Nicole said that she would encourage me to get involved with as many clubs and activities during the undergraduate program as I can because Grad Schools love you see you involved in many things because it make you become well rounded. She also said they like to see that you have gotten experience within the field and or have done some volunteer work related to the field. She said it is awesome you are getting a bunch of experience already in high school and that it already sets me ahead of my soon to be classmates. I find it very interesting that she said this because it sounds very similar to a talk I had with another Grad student on my college tour.

#2 She said that she is looking forward to working with kids every day and watching them grow and improve their speech/communication skills throughout the school year. I feel this shows she has a true passion for kids and only hopes for the betterment of their skills. I often times see this passion within myself.

#3 Nicole said that the biggest con she can thing of is the length of time needed to obtain the degree. This makes me wonder if some of the schooling is repetitive or what makes her feel that it should take shorter then 6 years. I am planning on doing a follow up interview just to ask a few more questions soon.

#4 She said that when going into grad school, she was pretty sure that she wanted to work at an elementary school. However, she went into grad school with an open mind and worked with clients from 1-75 years old and did my internship at both an elementary and middle school in order to really make sure that’s what I wanted. Nicole then said that another piece of advice is that grad school is the perfect time to try different settings since you aren’t locked into a job or a long-term commitment. I find this last piece of advice very valuable because I often find my self having tunnel vision and this is a good reminder to not do that from someone that has gone through the process.