 Welcome to our session about speech pathology careers and all the related fields to that. I'm Nancy Frischberg. I'm one of the organizers of the Linguistics Career Launch. And today we have support from Marcus Robinson as our Zoom producer. And he's also going to provide useful resources in the chat. And let's go ahead and meet our presenters. We've got two people with us who have been working in the field of speech pathology and communication disorders. And I'm happy to introduce you to Chandra Vita Babu and Caroline Johnson. And I hope that each of them will give us a little more insight into what brought them to this field and how they're doing in it. So without further ado, I'm going to let Chandra start. Hi. Thank you all for being here. I'm very excited to talk a little bit about my journey and help answer any questions. So I've been a speech language pathologist now for five years. And I currently work in the Sunnyvale Public School system. So when I first went into undergraduate school, I thought I was going to be an engineer like, you know, my parents were. And no idea anything about the field of speech language pathology. I took an interlinguistics course and I was just completely hooked. I just knew that I wanted to do something with linguistics for my career. So I was kind of like, what can you do with a linguistics degree? And because I knew I really wanted to do something kind of end with a helping kind of profession. So I found speech language pathology. And it actually turned out that I used to require speech therapy when I was in preschool and kindergarten age for articulation. I was not able to see some of the sounds correctly. So I was looking online. I found my old speech therapist. She's still working in just in Marin, just north of San Francisco. And I was able to go and intern with her. So I'd drive over and kind of observe what she was doing. And I just realized that was the field for me, being able to use language and linguistics. Those same theoretical concepts that I was learning in my linguistics classes in a profession that would be directly helping people. So I decided, you know, I just became hooked. I decided to find every opportunity I could and an undergraduate to become a graduate student because I know I'll probably get a few questions, especially if there's some undergraduates here about how would the UC degree to get into graduate school. And I'll be happy to talk more about that if that's interesting. And then as I've been working in my career, I've really focused on pediatrics. So I work primarily with the schools. I've also done a little bit of work in private clinics as also and also been doing some work where you can go into people's homes and provide services there. So I think that's kind of the cliff notes of what I've been doing so far. I muted myself. Okay, that sounds great. Thank you so much for that quick introduction. Caroline, can you give us an overview? Yeah. So my background, I went to Tulane University and I was really interested in French and linguistics. I took a French linguistics course and then hadn't really, you know, thought anything about linguistics as much as just like I was had a love of learning languages. So I was taking Russian and German and all these different languages. And then linguistics came up and, you know, the French linguistics course and I was like, this is actually the most interesting thing that I could ever think of studying. So I became a linguistics major as well as French major and I didn't know what I could do with my degree afterwards. I ended up going to study abroad in France and was thinking about, hey, what kind of career choice do I want afterwards? And I ended up teaching at a French immersion school. There's a lot of French immersion schools where I live in New Orleans, Louisiana. Cajun French is a native language of some speakers still in Louisiana. And there's a French Creole and Cajun French program as well at Tulane. So I was able to do some sociolinguistic work there with a PhD candidate. And so anyhow, I did go to become working at the French immersion school. I loved it. And then I went and was teaching ESL at with Catholic Charities. And then I decided I want to go to Russia and teach ESL there and see how I like the job seen as a ESL teacher. I stayed there a year and basically thought about what's the next step. I thought I did really love teaching, ESL. But I wasn't sure about continuing it for my lifelong career choice. Had heard about speech language pathology and a bio-psychology course. And I didn't really know too much more about it except for, wow, that sounds really interesting. It's very close to linguistics. And I'm interested in all aspects of linguistics. So I looked at grad schools. And when I came back to New Orleans, I applied and went to LSU, Louisiana State University. And so basically that's where I've that's where I got my masters and then ended up at one of the school systems here is a lot of charter schools. And now I work at a French immersion school. Like a French school of of New Orleans basically. Very cool. Okay. So now I think that it's clear. And I think I said this even in the in the one paragraph description of the session, which finally went out yesterday. Okay. And that is in order to practice speech or language pathology, you need to have an advanced degree of some kind. So you both did undergraduate work in linguistics and various other things that you've said, and then went on and got an advanced degree of masters, right? Yes, specifically, a master's is required. You can get a PhD. But in order to be a clinician, you will need a master's degree. That's something that I actually learned when I was in grad schools, I was asking one of my professors, why can't you just get a PhD in practice? But PhD courses are tend to be more theoretical, master's tend to be much more applicable. And as someone who did undergrad at UC Davis, I was not really used to how practical the courses were. So it was really, it was really nice being able to get to get that theoretical background in the practical one. Anything to add, Carolyn, where did you do your graduate work? LSU, yeah, in New Orleans. Yeah. So yeah, you do, you do have to have a master's. You can have a master's in science, I have a master's in communication disorders. And it's, it's definitely more practical work. You have clinicals and you have supervision when you're doing a clinical as you're supervised, when you're working with your clients. I definitely agree. It's more on the practical side. A PhD would be like leading you towards academia more or make potentially research, but you definitely need a master's. Right. Right. And the supervision part is really important too, where you get to, as Chandra was saying, follow somebody around or do the work and be observed and then get the critique before you go too far down some wrong headed direction. Exactly. 400 hours of internship are required for licensure. And yeah, most grad schools will do them for you. If you go to one of those online programs, my experience, they will make you find your hours by yourself. But I went to, I was also into, I went to my grad school and I'm in a physical side, University of Texas at Dallas and they were able to find the opportunities for us. Good. Yeah. That's my experience is that mostly the faculty in the graduate program know they have to, somebody's responsible for finding practicums and they probably have a bunch of liaison back and forth with different kinds of speech and hearing clinics or whatever. Right. There's externships. Well, I'm sure per graduate program it somewhat differs, but there's, you have on site clinics. So at LSU, we had a lot of, we had from semester to semester we had different clients. So for example, one semester I worked with mostly reading clients, another semester I worked with mostly language clients, another semester I worked more on like alternative and augmentative communications or working with more nonverbal clients. And then after four semester or four semesters of the on site clinics, you do your externships. I don't know if they call it something different. Chandru at your school, but basically you're going out into the field at, I worked at New Orleans school, oral school for the deaf. And I also worked at Lisa Fosse, which is why I knew about this job that I work at. And you know, outpatient or inpatient, there's a lot of places you can, you can get work at. Right. And so both of you ended up choosing school age children as your target audience or, you know, the participants in the therapy. But I think there are lots of other choices and probably some of your classmates took those, right? Yeah, I wanted to mention a couple of those. Oh, yeah. So the saying is that speech tanks with all just work from literally from infants all the way to geriatrics. You might be thinking, you know, an infant can't talk when they need to speech therapist, we work with feeding at that age. So even literally from the day that the child is born, you can work on feeding with them. In addition, there's a lot of work you can do with geriatrics as well. There is, for example, anyone who sustained a stroke and he's for a brain injury, they will tend to have communication or swallowing difficulties. And swallowing is another big part of our scope of practice. So yeah, I've got friends who work everywhere, from hospitals to skilled nursing facilities to home health. And there are a lot of opportunities and the field is growing. And there's supposed to be one, especially with the aging population and much more awareness of developmental disabilities. And even when I was in school in the 90s, you know, when I was just growing up, then there's just much more awareness. So it is a really great field and a lot of jobs are available. Cool. Do you have anything to add, Caroline? Yeah, I mean, I would just say like a lot of people might have heard of speech language pathology and the, you know, just the realm of like, oh, they work on stuttering and articulation. So working on speech sounds, but there's a lot more to the field. I definitely didn't know as much until, of course, I went to grad school about the field. But as Chandra was saying, there's, we're supposed to be the swallowing experts. So people who are having difficulty with breast feeding, so infancy up to geriatrics as well. We work on cognition, cognitive linguistics, voice. So if there's any sort of vocal disorder, dyslexia, language, social communication, so any, any sorts of, you know, all sorts of disorders. So do you think that your background in linguistics prepared you well for this or differently from where other places, other backgrounds that your colleagues came in with? I wouldn't say yes. Most of my colleagues came with an undergraduate degree in speech language pathology or communication disorders. I know that, I don't know where people from this panel or people everyone observing is from. As someone from a UC, I'm pretty sure none of the UCs any more offered that degree. And you might think, oh, I mean, that's not a good idea. Maybe I should not go into this field because I can't get the degree or should transfer out. That's not the case. My linguistics courses prepared me extremely well for the field. I feel like having the theoretical background of speech production, of articulation, and just of the neurolinguistics has really helped me in understanding the sort of the basis of the therapies that I'm doing. I would absolutely agree. I feel like we had an edge up. Most of my graduate colleagues were also speech language pathology undergraduate majors. And so there were maybe five of us in my class that were linguistics majors. And I feel like we did have an edge, you know, like we already knew international phonetic alphabet. We already understood phonetics, phonology. So doing those courses where you're actually analyzing more the nitty gritty and you have to do like diacritics and stuff, that was already kind of like, we already had a solid base. Whereas our cohort and our cohort, a lot of them were kind of learning it. Starting from scratch, right? Well, and then one of the, I mean, this is sort of a niche question, but I'm wondering whether any of you has had contact with people who have social and pragmatic disorders of language. I don't know if you've seen that. Yeah, I have a lot of, so right now clients, you mean? Yeah, I have a lot of, well, I don't want to say a lot, but I have several clients who are nonverbal and who are on the autism spectrum. I have some high functioning clients who are on the autism spectrum as well. We work on social language as well with the high functioning clients. And so we work on proxemics and just any sort of, so because we're school based, it has to be sort of in relation to how things are functioning in the school setting. So we need to make sure that we're working on practical skills that we encounter in school setting with classmates, their age and adults. And how do you speak differently with an adult versus a classmate? And let's do a lot of, for social language, for the high functioning clients, we do a lot of role play and like video based watching an interaction fail and then watching it, you know, have success. And so then then we role play that. Yeah. And that's something too that I work on a lot, social primatic with many of my students who are also on the autism spectrum. It's a very interesting one too, just because of how it's not as black and white. Like for a lot of articulation therapy, maybe you have the child say the R sound, support with the R sound 20 times and they say it right, 10 of them, do you know how they did? But it's a much more opaque social primatics as well too, especially because if you teach it wrong, somebody might just talk like, I mean, if you just teach them how to do things, you don't just say the same thing to someone every time. And you can tell, right? Sometimes I feel like, you know, Sheldra Cooper from the Big Bang Theory, you know, he maybe was not taught maybe right now to do his social primatic strategies. So have the time he does things that are technically right, but not exactly. So I like it because you get to do a lot of things like you're going to have a lot of fun being role playing, you get to watch videos with them. So and that's what is one of my favorite parts of the job is working with some of the social primatic goals. Good. Well, I'm glad I asked the question. Now, Chandra, I'm going to guess that you grew up bilingual. Is that true? Essentially, so I'm a heritage speaker of Tamil. So that means I can understand pretty well. Speaking is a bit of a challenge. And yeah, I definitely took a Spanish in school. And given where I am in the barrier, it is very much required. So I use a lot of Spanish, especially with communicating with the students and especially a lot of the parents who might have an English proficiency. Okay, so that was sort of part of my question. And then obviously, Caroline, you've become bilingual, even if you didn't grow up that way and you at least by how good you're Russian. I would say intermediates. You know, one of my side interests is just learning language. So I've learned Chinese and Spanish as well as those other languages that I've studied before. And are those coming up in useful in therapy situations with the parents? Spanish can Spanish definitely does. Because I do have several parents who don't speak English at all. And so we have individual education plans, IP meetings, where you have to go over the goals with the parents and to be able to easily speak with the parents and not have to. I mean, we could bring in a translator, of course, but it's a lot easier because you hear it straight from my mouth. And I know what I'm saying is the correct way, you know, rather than it being translated by someone who was a lay person who doesn't actually understand the technical language that we might be using. But French has also come into it in handy because on the daily, I have to speak French with my colleagues, all the teachers, because it is French immersion school, they only have one hour of English a day. So there is an English program, an LA program, but most of the days that they have is in French. But as a speech language pathologist, you should always provide therapy in the native language of the child where you can. And I've only ever had two clients who are French speaking, native French speaking clients. But that does really come into handy because, you know, you're supposed to provide in their native language. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, to kind of add on to that, if a child has a speech, any sort of speech and language problems in English, but not in their native language, that is not a disability. Because like if I was to go to France and start speaking French, I would not be able to find my way around there. That doesn't mean that I need any sort of speech and language services. So, so it's always is that you have to assess when you're because you can't just take a student on, you have to assess them. And I could talk a little bit more about that as needed. You should be you should always have either an interpreter or yourself should be in there, it should be in their native language. And, and also that's been helped. It's been a hell of my linguistics background, because there's been some times to where like, I've had clients who have, who don't use various grammatical forms like one, like I think was a Korean speaker didn't mark the past tense in some words, and also didn't say the THN. And I was doing a lot of research on that and Korean doesn't necessarily do that. So because of that, as able to show to the IEP individual education plan team and the parents saying that there's no disability, it is a language learning issue. And that is very important, because especially historically, in California and I believe nationwide, kids and minority backgrounds have been over identified for speech and language and special education services. So it's a really profound thing what we're saying is because what we're like what we're saying is I know our services are nice to have, but we're saying those child is a disability and it's a really profound thing to think about. And you have to be really selective about who you take, because there's a bank. Yeah, there's a difference versus disorder and you do have to analyze and make sure because a lot of teachers will say, oh, they don't, they're not, you know, especially in a French version program. Okay, their first language, let's say is Arabic. And then they have their learning French as their second language, right? And so then there's that third language of English. Well, maybe the ELA teacher is referring, and also the French teacher is referring, well, you really have to make sure that you are assessing, is this a difference or disorder? And in the case of this child or many of the kids Chandra is speaking of, you would just get ESL services. Okay, good. And that isn't you. Right. Yeah, we don't do that. I actually just got that in a meeting and the last week of school, a parent was saying, my child, you know, we just moved here, they don't speak very good English. Can you help with that? I said, if they have a speech and language, if they have a speech and language impairment, I'll help with the impairment. I'm not here to teach English. And that is something that, yeah, you're going to definitely see a lot if you work in the schools. And notice, especially over the past few years, and if ever someone comes from another country, they're always immediately referred. And just, and that's just something too, we have to do a lot of, we don't just work with the kids, you have to educate the parents and the teachers a lot. And it's something that, yeah, I might not have expected to do as much as, yeah, when I'm doing it this time. But it's always something you every day. Well, that was good, because I was going to say what kind of a career path is there. And mostly, I think it's, you stay in the same role, but you might feel like you're getting better at certain parts of it. But you've got a lot of variety there anyway, because you've got the kids, the parents, the instructors, besides yourself, and all the school services to be negotiating a lot of variety. And yeah, we can also move up a lot of people if they want to can move up into more school administrative roles, you want to get in there. And yeah, there's a lot of more responsibility, but also a lot more money. That's true. Okay, special education director. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, good. That's a good point to make. Thank you. I forgot about that part. But I would also say you can make more money in hospitals or clinics. Education is definitely more about the love of your clients and why you wanted to be in this field, which field you prefer. But you can definitely move sideways and nothing is, you're not stuck in education if you go into education for your first job. Okay, so that's that was my next question. It's like, okay, I've done school kids for the last 12 years. Right. Maybe I should think about moving into some other client base that happens. Yeah, geriatric hospital, whatever. Right. So there is that lateral movement. Right. So basically, you need your your masters, you need those 400 clinical hours plus supervised. You have to take your praxis, which is a national examination. You have to have your then you get your state license and then you have a national license, which means that you've been supervised for a clinical fellowship over a year and mentored over the year. So you're basically seeing your clients normally and paid being paid, you know, at your at the normal rate, but then you're also having that mentorship for one year. And then basically, you're you're open to a lot of jobs, you know, the like Chandra said, it's a growing field. So there's I think 25% growth every year. It's just really like, or maybe it's from maybe maybe over the next five years. But it's it's one of the wrong fields. All the subspecialties, I mean, is our school jobs growing as well as elder jobs, you know, where elders are your clients? It is my understanding that all of them are growing at essentially the same rate. I mean, just based on the fact that like, I mean, I work up in the Bay Area, and it's, and we are the place that the compensation is pretty good, I would say. Yeah, like, it's not me, you probably would make more if you were like a at Goldman Sachs, but it's, you know, pretty good for what we are doing. Yeah. And so, and you're still having trouble finding people. I get calls from recruiters, like, pretty much every day, it's like, that's the only people who call me these days. And then, yeah, I was just talking to like, someone, you know, just in the community, and then they were saying, oh, yeah, I now run a bunch of skill nursing facilities, if you want a job just on the weekends or something, you can have it. So first day, I feel like I've been very, I feel like I've been very fortunate and very privileged to have this kind of job where there's this much career opportunity. And I've seen this everywhere, because I did my master's work in Texas, everyone had their head jobs and people moved for either family or just because of where they wanted to be. You can find a job anywhere you want to go. Like, yeah. Yeah, so I would just second all that he said, you can, you know, go into any sort of realm that you want to all across the US, there's always jobs available. And there's a shortage of speech-language pathologists who are always looking and people, you know, after I already had my job, I still had people calling me, oh, do you want to apply for this job? We need speech-language pathologists and like, no, I already have a job. Wow. And yeah, and also if like there's someone thinking, I don't even know what I want to do. Well, first of all, I mean, if you guys are all undergrads, you should probably take some classes, do some of your chips and then see if you like that. But if you're, see which one you like more, but if you don't really know or you still just think everything is not appealing, if you work in more of the rural areas, you will be seeing everything. Like I've got two friends, one worked up in Anchorage or not even Anchorage, I think one of the smaller towns in Alaska, and one worked up in Sonora, California, sort of by a bit out of Yosemite, kind of in that foothills area. And there in those hospitals, you see everything like a stroke patient comes in, you work with them. And then next time you work with like a five-year-old who can't say the L sound. So there are opportunities to just do everything as well, as well as kind of specialize. And I also know some people are like, I just work with childhood practice speech and that's all I do. So you can really choose the extent of what you want to work on as part of your scope. Yeah. And I think there are some people who are in private practice also, just give referrals, right? Yeah, that's right. I did that for a while. Yeah, and kind of still do that. So you can either work with an established clinic. And then those are pretty nice. The advantages for that are supposed to school so that you get less clients and you get to work with them individually. Yeah, but then you also might not get the same amount of hours, but depending on where you are, you will get a lot of those. And then the parents will also love you a lot too, because they're paying for you, schools are free. And if something is free, you don't think it's as good. Well, I feel like the parents, it might depend on the school, but yeah, I think the parents are usually very supportive. But it is true. You have more of an individual rapport with the client. You are able to work one-on-one for an hour versus school. You have a group of maybe three, four kids, and you're all working on the same goal of articulation. But this child is more severe. This child is more mild. You still need to group them and make sure that the scheduling is one of the hardest things in the school setting is because the second graders are on the schedule and the first graders are on the schedule and you have to make sure that you're pulling when it's appropriate. Yes. And I would say that too, 90% of the parents that I have are very respectful and they're very grateful for the service they're having. But as you know, there's always going to be, you cannot be friends with everyone. A lot of times you'll just see what they say is the five stages of grieving, which apparently we're just completely made up. I just learned about this on a podcast yesterday. You'll see those five stages for parents as well too because a lot of times, especially the more severe students that you have, or even two, maybe someone's parent has sustained a stroke, they're going to be grieving to them as well too. There's a lot of that level of emotional labor that you may have to do as well too, but that can be nice too, especially when they're supporting them on this very unique journey. So that's an interesting point. Now how much of a prep have you had for handling the emotional labor that comes with the grieving of the loss? I mean, I'm very familiar with this because I worked in deafness for a long time and I'm a signer and you know, I'm not sad about somebody being deaf, but I've met the parents who have had to come to terms with my child has this hearing loss. They didn't ever had it, so it's not really a loss at one level. But you know, they're dealing with a lack of hearing in a society that doesn't really appreciate that. And my child is not like me because I'm not deaf. And so you know, is this going to cause a rift between this close parent relationship that I'm expecting to have? And here I can't communicate with my kid. So I'm familiar with that whole business of dealing with the loss, coming to some level of acceptance and so on. But more from the point of view, I'm familiar with the point of view of a child who's now an adult and it's still trying to help their parent realize this is normal for me and this is fine and I'm doing okay. Yeah. Right. I mean, I will say my background at my school, I'm sure it's different than you know, in each grad program, but I did not feel like we had a lot of counseling. I mean, we didn't really have that much preparation. Yeah, preparation. And it's just something that, you know, as an empathetic person, you can understand, you know, how a parent might be feeling and it is really important to be able to put things softly. And there are some, there are, you know, sometimes where it's a lot of education and maybe there's not that acceptance. You know, like I've had parents who have said my child does not have a disorder. My child does not have a developmental disorder. My child is not on the autism spectrum. There's nothing wrong with my child. And just being gentle and, you know, of course, maybe one parent is a little bit more receptive than another and just making sure that their understanding that we're here to support and not to, you know, blame or label label label isn't to dismiss the help us decide how do we proceed. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's a hard message to be able to deliver in and be heard. Right. Yeah. So I want to encourage people in the audience to join in the conversation here. We've been having fun without you for the last half hour. So please come and ask questions of our guests or make your own comments. Alfonso, are you ready? Come off mute. Okay. Okay. There we go. Thank you. Thank you for the question for the information that you provided. I have a question. You mentioned these 400 hours of training, clinical training that you need to have. How much time, you know, taking time as a unit of measure here, would that take or for your case in your particular cases, how much did that take? So if I mentioned the question, right, like just how I guess like how many semesters or so would it take to get those 400 hours? I was able to do that in my in two years. So four semesters, including summers. And because the classes are scheduled in a way that you would have time for that. So like what I do is normally I'd go in the intern for three or four hours a day, and then go and then after that go and take classes in the afternoon. And then I even had time for other things. Like I was able to do some work study as well to help make some cash during grad school. And then the final semester that I had was or internship semester. So what they had was actually where for two days out of the week, I just was full time working. So I basically was in a school full time there from the day that basically from the day that they showed up or the time that the SLP showed up there to the time that they left. So that day I didn't that semester, my classes were on other days. And I would just spend those days working. But yes, if you are in a program, especially one of the physical occasion, they will schedule it around so that you are able to get your hours in time to graduate. Yeah. Yeah, so I agree with that. We did have the summers on so you were working through the summers as well and taking classes as well. So the first couple of semesters are a little lighter with your case load. So maybe you have five clients and you're really working on those five clients. And then the next semester you're going to have 10 clients and then so on. And then by the time you go to Chandra calls those internships, I had externships. I don't know if it's just we were in different settings. You say tomato, I say tomato, I think. Yeah. But but yeah, so in the different settings you're working, you're taking classes maybe at night, but you're working during the day and able to and my situation it was 40 days a week, but it just depends. Thank you. Our pleasure. Yeah. We also got a question in the chat about what were the requirements on entry to your graduate program? I just put a spreadsheet that I made. It's a tiny bit out of date, but yes, this is the one that I used when I was looking at various grad schools to get into. And I'm assuming that two people here are linguistics graduates from like probably UC Berkeley or probably from a place that doesn't require all these. You'll probably see a bunch of courses that make no sense to you because I used the UC Davis coursework. But yes, basically in order to get into a grad program, you just need a degree in something for most programs. And I don't know if you want me to go into kind of the differences between extended masters and post back programs. I could do that. And so basically, I am assuming that here, everyone is getting a linguistics degree. And I'm assuming from Berkeley or just a Berkeley Davis any UC. It's not only UCs. This is a nationwide program. And in fact, we have people sitting here from other countries, but we're always talking from the point of view of the US except when otherwise spoken. Nice. Yeah. All right. Yeah. So basically, if there's anyone here who has a degree in communication disorders, you can just completely ignore this. You will be able to just get into any grad school program without having to do any extra work. But for the rest of us, who have a linguistics degree and weren't able to either double major or minor or anything like that, there are a couple of options that you have. One of them is basically that you go into a program and you spend an extra semester there. That's basically what I did. So my degree was in linguistics. So I spent a semester beforehand. Before I actually took a lot of grad classes, just taking all these undergrad classes that weren't offered at UC Davis, like an ambient physiology of the speech and hearing mechanism. Another one was like the serving communication disorders. Another one was speech science. And a lot of the courses that we do need as part of being a speech science pathologist are things that are offered at a lot of schools, including phonetics, a lot of language development, like basically a life-saving development. You have to take a little bit of biological sciences as well. And some of these kind of things as well. We'll also link another PowerPoint presentation that I made, talking a bit more about this. So what you can do is you can take them in your grad program. Or if your GPA might not be the best, which I fully understand, mine was also not too. That whole engineering, the whole year as an engineering major really was not the best for my grades. You might want to spend some time taking a post background. So that's where you go to another school. You can do this online at Utah State. Or if you go up to Portland, if you want to be a Portland hipster or whatever, and go up there, you can do it up there. And you just take a year of courses, you get your GPA up, and then you apply it to a master's program like that. Those are the two main options. I talked a bit more about that in that spreadsheet that I just linked over there too. So in my master's program, we had a there were two routes. There was a background, students with the background of communication disorders who had an undergraduate in communication disorders. And then there was a non-background. And I was non-background. So same, I just had to take an extra semester beforehand and like intro to communication disorders and, you know, like phonetics, I believe, and anatomy, certain courses. And if you had a good, you know, good enough GPA, I think you have to have an A average, then you just move on. Oh, and Janice says volunteering and shadowing hours are not required in the U.S.? I can't speak to this as someone who is not practiced outside of the U.S. I'm sorry. She's talking about, she's sitting in Canada, and she's thinking about coming back to the U.S. or coming to the U.S. I mean, I can't remember. We had to do observations, on say observations, during our graduate studies. So we had to do an observation, then we would write up a report, we would look at what the client was working on with the therapist, and then, you know, did the therapist work on the goals? And, you know, what we could see. So we did an observation report for each of the kids that we observed or adults that we observed. I don't remember how many hours we had to observe, but yeah, there was definitely. Does that fit with the 400? Is that part of the observation? I just realized I misread the question. Sorry about that, Janice. Yeah, so you do have to, you have to shadow. I believe, well, we all call that different things, but the 400 hours, my understanding was 25 of them have to be just shadowing where you don't do any therapy, and those, you can even do them in undergrad as well. So, yes, so those are part of the requirements, and your grad program will help you with that. So if you don't have, and if you don't have them already, they will give them to you. Right. Oh, right. Yeah, now you say that, that sounds right. So, yeah, 375 have to be your own work, and then 25. So you could do on-site observation or you could do off-site observation where you're, you know, in any sort of setting, if you're interested in working with deaf education or if you're interested in working on, you know, start, you know, clinicals, clinics that work only on stuttering or something. Right, or going to the VA and working there with veterans who had speech issues as a result of traumatic brain injury, for example. Unfortunately, we're spreading that disorder a lot more because we keep getting in wars where there are brain injuries, right? Yes. So that's not a great thing. But anyway, okay, now she says, yeah, in Canada you need volunteer hours to get into the speech path to school. I want to say a few schools do, but it doesn't hurt. You can get volunteers, just get them. Yeah, I think actually volunteer hours, that can set you apart, you know, as a, having an undergraduate in linguistics, that can set you apart and get you into a firm. So, especially if maybe your, your, maybe if your GPA wasn't super, maybe it was a B average or something. If you show that your interest is real and you've gotten observation hours and you've put that on your application, then that would give you an edge up. How has your work changed because of COVID? So, we kind of moved to the remote learning, fully remote learning in March of 2020, but because I think that's when sort of, we sort of kind of, it's like shutting down in person learning. So, with that, we sort of, we just did tele-therapy. Towards the end, I was doing tele-therapy for the best, pretty much all the students. So I moved to Zoom. And there's definitely a lot of students who could do it. Like a lot of our, my older kids who were working on articulation or maybe language goals, they were able to manage their learning pretty well. And, or sometimes their parents could just set up a computer with them and then they could, the parents could do something else. For a lot of the lower functioning kids they had, or the more, once with the more non-verbal, the ones who had more behavioral needs, we'd have the parents basically help kind of like our system. So there's a lot more opportunities for parent education than you get normally in this same year. So that was it. I feel like I worked just as hard, if not harder, being remote as opposed to working in person. And, and yeah, it was, and we also returned in person right after I got two weeks post my second shot. And it was, it has been interesting working with the students again. But we, it also didn't feel like completely 100% normal because we would have to wear a mask and distancing. And also for a while, when we're in whatever that tier was, maybe the orange tier, whatever the tiers were, we couldn't see students from different cohorts. And as Caroline will tell you, it could probably greet me. It is an extra possible to maintain a schedule just with students in the same class. You know, oh yeah, teacher, like, you know, I have a second grader working on the R sound from teacher X. And then another one on teacher Y like they're never together. So so that made it a bit challenging. And we'll see what happens next month. I don't know. I know they really want a physical full physical reopening. We'll see with the Delta variant. But I mean, personally, I feel last year this time last year I was at the going back was completely unsafe and at least now for staff, it's probably going to be okay. We'll see what happens for students. Mm hmm. So in my experience, yeah, we shut down the schools and in March. And so we were doing virtual services. They were of shorter duration. I have I don't know what your case looks like, but I have over 65 to 70 clients. And it is impossible in one week to keep this hours and not be able to group them. And and so I did more individual sessions, but of shorter duration. And actually, I saw a lot of improvement, especially for my articulation clients. Because I was doing what's called five minute articulation. And as study research shows that if you do more frequent shorter duration therapy and articulation, that you'll see more improvement. So I saw a lot of kids actually be able to get out of speech, you know, graduate from speech, we'll say. However, I did see the flip side of a lot of there was a lot of difficulty with access. So maybe we couldn't, we just weren't reaching a parent, we tried calling, we tried emailing, you know, we still need to get these services. Some parents didn't have access to internet, our school was providing free internet like Wi Fi hotspots and and, you know, technology so that they could, but then that was a little slow to coordinate. And so there were just a lot of gaps. And then, same as Chandra was saying, for my nonverbal clients, that was a big challenge. So I did a lot of just consultative services with the parents of, okay, this is what I want you to work on. This is this is why we're working on this. Let me show you some videos of how you work on this. And it was more of like parent education, actually, that I found, found really beneficial. You had a lot of parent buy-in, you know, depending on the client for sure, but and they understood, okay, whereas you don't necessarily have that time to speak directly to the parent during the school year when you have all your kids grouped together. And there just isn't a lot of time. There's just a million balls that you're juggling anyways. And so being able to take that time to do consultative services really had a lot of growth for clients, you know, if you work on it at home, and you work at it on it at school, then you're going to see a lot more growth. Okay, cool. We got the very pragmatic question here for all you pragmatists. What's the starting salary for somebody in speech path? It depends heavily on where you are. I'm going to say Yeah, state by state. Right. So there's a lot of regional differences. And then I'm assuming there are some specialty differences. Also, you already alluded to that. Exactly. I'd say if you're in the Bay Area, you can expect something. If you work at a good school district, like one that has a lot of tax revenue, then you can probably expect something in about the 70s to start at least. And yeah, yeah, I know. Yeah, exactly. I mean, even with the higher cost of living, it makes sense to be here. I mean, like I was looking for what I could get in Texas, I could not get this. No, in the south, it's one of the lower paying regions. And in education, it's the lower paying range. So my starting salary, I don't know, I don't know, it was in the 40s. And higher 40s, but still, you know, with the master's and you have all of your loans that you have from school, wasn't great. But I was able to, you know, increase that. So I'm approaching 60 now. And I've worked six years. Six years. Okay. Yeah. Okay. It does depend on region and hospital setting, you're going to get a lot higher rate. So you're going to get 70s, 80s, sometimes higher depending on the region and the, and just what the expectations are. Okay. So let me just close with a last question about what's the most rewarding part of your work? And what, if anything, is the tedious part of your work? Oh, yeah. Let's say for me, the most rewarding is just seeing, it's just, you know, when you get to see the kind of differences. Like, sometimes when I'm taking some session, I'm thinking, oh, this, like six months ago, this child would not have done that. And also came out of this very, this meeting, which is very, very intense case, you know, a lot of needs. And then this mom actually came up and said, you know, my son, you know, wants to be a speech therapist because you are. And yeah. And this is like, because he was also, you know, a person of color as well too. And, and also from male identifying as well as I am. And we didn't really talk about the demographic differences. I'm glad to see some people who are, we are a field that is very Caucasian and very biased towards female gender, because it's very nice to see in this, some people who are not part of this as well too, really having these conversations about diversity and we just need a lot of, like I think a lot of my insight I have is because of, is because of my, in fact, I'm a minority in two ways. Being male was going to be the minority, right? Yeah, this is, I'm in the one field that I am. And it's been, it's been kind of, it's been very interesting, you know, doing this and really good looking, you know, making, it was really examined, so a lot of the privileges that I have and I'm ready to use that. But given that a lot of my clients are also male identifying. And I think it's really important to kind of have these kind of, these kind of things that show to, you know, that you don't have to be in a sort of gendered job and the world has changed. Great. Carol. So I would say, similarly, when you see improvement in a client and when you see kind of the aha moment of, oh, well, you've been telling me this and like, oh, I just realized I'm, you know, like, when you see improvement in your client and you see that they can do it on their own, it's really rewarding. Always working with, like being able to collaborate with interprofessionals. So like the OT, potentially the PT occupational therapist and physical therapist, being able to collaborate with special education. You know, when you work as a team and you're able to collaborate, you'll see a lot more growth and people understand, okay, you're working on this, I'm working on this, how can we like mesh those things? And that, that helps the child grow as well. I would say educating parents. A lot of times I see, you know, I've been really interested in oral facial myofunctional therapy, which is, you know, basically looking at the structures of the oral structures and how the muscles are moving differently. And if there is some sort of oral facial myofunctional disorder, having, being able to identify and refer so that the child can get help in that area, because if there's a, you know, a physical reason for an articulation disorder, you definitely want to make sure that you are addressing the physical, you know, reason. And so I'm having that educational piece. And also I would say one of the more rewarding things is continuing to grow. So we have continuing education. We have to get a certain number of hours each year in courses. And I love learning about, you know, different areas. And, you know, we do have to hone our skills in certain areas, because, but we also have to be kind of like able to tackle anything that comes our way, because you never know what kind of client you're going to have. So it's a lot of, it's very rewarding because it's not just one thing and you're really helping and you do see the impact and your families are very grateful. Great. Having no further questions from the audience, I am going to say a big thank you to both of you for joining us this morning. I think it's morning everywhere still. Oh, it's just turning noon for some of you on the east coast. And I look forward. We see, I see there are three spontaneous claps. So thank you very much from the audience. And great. I'm glad that this was informative for everybody. And I appreciate your spending the time with us. So thanks.