SLP Skills Saturday: Desire to Learn

I've decided to add a themed day to my blog. The new themed day, "SLP Skills Saturday" will be a  feature that will highlight a different personality trait or characteristic that I think SLPs (and soon-to-be SLPs) need. Hope you enjoy, and don't forget to follow me or like/comment/share my posts! I love it, and it'll help me make this blog better. :)

A big aspect of this job is learning, whether it be in your undergraduate, graduate or professional years. This job necessitates a broad scope of subjects to be a licensed SLP, which means that you have to be as well-rounded as possible.

In your undergraduate years you have to study a variety of areas-- biological sciences, physical sciences, statistics, communication sciences/disorders, language development, psychology... just to name a few. So, if you thought you could become a SLP without having to take a biology-related or chemistry/physics... think again. You'll especially need physics for later classes in hearing and speech sciences where you calculate the frequencies of sounds and such.

As for your graduate studies, you'll do some of these classes more in-depth. So be prepared to build a solid foundation in your undergraduate years to build upon. Of course you'll also be studying specific disorders related to speech and hearing, and applying them in your clinical sessions. That leads to another thing: be prepared to do clinicals. Think you can be licensed without getting supervised training? Then you might want to look for a different profession. You need many hours (think hundreds, not just tens of hours) of supervised clinical experience in which you will be critiqued on your lesson plans, evaluations and treatments. If that's not how you want to learn and get accredited, this might not be for you.

Lastly, all SLPs are required to continue learning even after they have graduated and gotten their CCC's. You're required to take a certain amount of Continuing Education Units (CEUs) EVERY year. This is to keep you up-to-date on new things happening in the field and to keep you well-rounded (of course, you can probably take some credits in your specialty too. SO maybe not completely well-rounded.) If you don't want a job that requires you to keep learning each year to stay licensed, then you might want to look elsewhere.

Hope you found this helpful and it wasn't so negative! Haha. I didn't mean for it to seem like "don't do this if...", that's just the way this one turned out! Look out for the next "SLP Skills Saturday" in two weeks! (Maybe next week... I'm liking this idea!)