The official blog of the National Student Speech Language Hearing Association
Late Diagnosis When I attended speech-language therapy as a child, my primary goal was articulation of my /r/. There were no pragmatic goals assigned because daycare gave me a built-in group of peers whom I saw every day. My mother inadvertently laid out the social rulebook of how to mask with explicit instruction: “Say please and thank you like this, introduce yourself like this, smile…
Being born and raised in paradise (in my case, Sint Maarten) has its pros and cons. Although the Caribbean offers incredibly rich culture, food, and scenery, many islands face limited access to specialized health care. That access can be the difference between recovery and continued decline. My family and I know this only too well because we directly experienced it for ourselves. In 2021, my…
It was the first week of my Clinical Fellowship as a newly minted speech-language pathologist (SLP), and I encountered something I was completely unprepared for: I walked into a patient’s room and discovered—upon attempting to rouse them from what I thought was sleep—that they had actually died, alone, in that hospital room. Let’s rewind to earlier that same day. My plan that morning had been…
Conversations about diversity and inclusion often emphasize the value of representation. While representation is important, acknowledging its value raises a deeper question: How do we move beyond simply recognizing its importance and begin actively creating change? In a field like communication sciences and disorders, where clinicians work with increasingly diverse populations, this question becomes even more relevant. Through conversations with and responses from CSD students across the country,…