#slpgradschool

[theshyslp-blog]

Ask me questions!

I am a first year student in SLP grad school and am available to help with any questions future grad students may have about the admissions process!

[theshyslp-blog]

6th Week Complete

Everything is going great!

Clinic:

Both placements (preschool and adult) are going really well.

I have become much less nervous around my adult clients, which is great! I think I can still do even better, however for now I think I’m doing the best I can. 

The preschool placement is so much fun. As someone who doesn’t think they wanted to work with children, this placement is much better than I anticipated. We started speech and language screenings using the PLS-5 a few weeks ago. At first it was pretty scary trying to get through the protocol, however its really easy to go through the test now. 

The one aspect that I don’t like is the speech sample we have to gather at the end of each screening. It’s so difficult to get some kids to talk! I’m still working on perfecting the questions I can ask the child to get the most words produced. 

Classes

The hardest class is definitely my articulation and phonology disorders course. We just had our midterm yesterday and I honestly don’t know how it went. I feel like my answers were very subjective and it al depends on how the professor decides to grade it. Since the class is only once a week, I won’t get my grade back for a week unless she uploads grades online. 

My neuroscience class midterm did go pretty well. I received a 91%, which was a little unexpected because of how much information was included on the test. Additionally, my quizzes and other work have been close to 100% as of right now. 

My other classes have their midterms coming up in the next 2 weeks, but I’m not too worried right now. As long as articulation turns out to be okay, I think the rest will be fine!

I’m definitely nowhere near as stressed as I thought I would be in my first semester of graduate school and I hope to stay this stress-free for as long as I possibly can. 

[theshyslp-blog]

3 weeks complete!

Its Sunday night and tomorrow I start my fourth (omg!) week of grad school. 

Clinic:

Preschool placement: 

Its definitey exhausting, but it is really fun too! We are primarily screening kids for hearing difficulty, but we start screening speech and language on Tuesday. 

The kids are, for the most part, really sweet and funny, but some are kind of difficult to test. Especially the kids who understand Spanish better than English. 

I’m getting the hang of it though! I still have a few kinks to work out when interacting with the kids, but overall I really like it so far. 

As a bonus, all the 2nd years tell me that I’m lucky to have this placement because I have already completed 10 of my required 20 hearing screening hours and its only the 4th week!

Adult Group Placement:

This is even more exhausting than the preschool placement!

I’ve officially been to this group twice and I go again tomorrow afternoon. 

I’m assigned a small group that plays card games as a way to work on speech and language

The first week of therapy was last week. Iwas a nervous wreck. I kept going to fast and wasn’t assertive enough. It wasn’t my proudest moment. 

I’m hoping this week is a little better! We will see tomorrow.

Classes:

Classes are going very well!

The level of difficulty hasn’t really hit me yet. I am not too stressed about anything for now. (Come talk to me at midterms though)

I had my first quiz last wednesday in neuroscience and I received a 100% which I was very proud of. I have another quiz this wednesday so I hope I can keep the same momentum going!

In neuroscience, I also impressed the professor because I was the only person in the class to figure out why our fictional clinical case patient was producing fluent, but meaningless speech while being able to follow verbal commands (arcuate faciculus was damaged!)

All other classes haven’t had many assignments yet. No exams yet either! Most classes are just reading, class participation, and homework. I’m sure that will change very soon!

 Other Thoughts:

Overall, I seem to be managing the transition to grad school pretty well. I’m happy with my performance (other than in my neurogenic group, but even that isn’t terrible!) and hope to ony keep improving!

[marsbar91]

At this rate, I may end up hating writing...

As a person who loves to write and has written many papers in her day ( some were damn good too), I have never in my life heard of a teacher demanding I don't use quotations in a paper. Like zero. For a research topic. And she doesn't want the details of the experiment either, just the results. Seems to me like someone is too lazy to read through an actual detailed literature review...which may I remind you, I was taught how to write several times in undergrad and once in grad school. Seems to me that learning how to do anything is utterly pointless when teachers just make their own rules and provide you with conflicting info all the time.

[marsbar91]

What good are breakdowns when you still get nothing accomplished? Im not cut out for this grad school thing. Nope.