Tuck

Nose Knows

Fourier analysis

Yeah, I've been on edge about this open house invitation. I'm starting to think they aren't doing it again this year because last year, the invitations came out the first week of February for an open house the first week of March. They can't push the open house back much further without it being after decisions rather than before, and they can't realistically expect to give people two weeks' notice to travel to Chicago. I'd guess they either aren't doing it at all this year, or are doing it after decisions go out like Vandy does.

I didn't apply there for two reasons. I want to work in a medical setting before heading to my PhD - acute or subacute care. A more urban location offers better rotations and CFY options for this. Second is location. I don't like the idea of living somewhere cold and flat, and my S.O. needs to be able to get a job wherever I go to school. He works in the tech industry. I made a list of about 12 schools that would be a good fit for me academically, and we narrowed that list together based on places he'd be willing/able to move to. The schools I ended up with are in Chicago (where his current company's headquarters is located), Salt Lake City (surprisingly, sort of a hub for the kind of work he does), Boulder (Denver is close enough to commute to and would be great for him), and Nashville (maybe a little harder for him, but driving distance from both our families and my first choice academically). It's not all about him, though. Each of these schools has multiple faculty working in my area of interest (read: potential thesis supervisors), appealing placements, and generally appealed to me academically.

My school lets every professor set their grading scale. I would have a 4.0 for my postbac classes were it not an A- in the first one, which was a 93! Argh!

animal husbandry

Rock on!

bird watching

What up?

How many of you would like to do a PhD after your clinical master's? Will you do a CFY and get your C's? Take some time off to work? Go straight through? What's your plan for bolstering your PhD applications while doing the master's? Why did you decide to do a clinical degree first instead of going straight for the PhD? Do you have an idea about your research topic? Anything else? There seemed to be some interest about this in the applications thread, and I thought it would give us something productive to discuss while we wait to hear from schools. :-)

I think I'm going to start a new thread on SLP masters students interested in the PhD. There seems to be a lot of interest here. I'm interested as well.

I'm 26; I'll be 27 by the time my decisions come in. :-) I feel older than most students because I finished undergrad at 19 and have been in my career for 7 years.

plane tickets

Does the April 15th thing apply to professional programs and master's degrees also?

I took the GRE in the very first month of the new scoring system. I got a 170 on verbal (perfect score, 99%), 156 on quantitative, and 5.5 on analytical writing (96%). The first crop of data that was released (and my initial score report) indicated that 156 on the Q was 74th percentile. This is what I entered on all my applications for speech-language pathology clinical MS programs. They were due Jan 15 - Feb 1, and I am awaiting decisions. I recently looked at my official score report, and now that more data has been gathered on the new test, they are saying that 156 on Q is 68th %tile. The ETS website about score concordance information has two downloadable documents about the verbal and quantitative section: http://www.ets.org/gre/institutions/scores/interpret The PDF file available there shows a Q score of 156 as being 68th %tile, but the Excel spreadsheet still shows it as being 74th %tile. My fear is that the schools I applied to are going to look at my applications, see that I entered 74th percentile, then look at my score report, which I assume says 68th based on when I ordered it, and conclude that I intentionally misrepresented my score. I've thought of writing a letter to each department explaining this and including printouts from ETS, but I don't want to draw negative attention to myself or appear disorganized right out of the gate. What would you folks do in this situation?

I haven't seen anyone else on here who applied to the University of Utah. Did any of you who are lurking apply there? What are your thoughts on the program?

I would ask about tenure-track placement rates, both for the program in general and for your particular advisor. I would also ask about completion time for both.

Lots of good advice here already, but I wanted to add that you should talk to your advisor about the possibility of re-taking the two major classes you made Cs in. If they were CSD classes, that could be really helpful. Different schools treat re-takes differently. They may average the grades, or they may replace it, which would be even better. See if you can get your 25 clinical observation hours in as well. Visit your professors to ask them these same questions. They may have some good ideas on local places you could work or volunteer that would look really good on your CV. One more thing... this is a long shot, but depending on the circumstances that caused your bad grade in the art class, would it be possible to arrange to have your grade recorded as a W, Incomplete, medical withdrawal, etc.? That might be something to look into your school's policies on.

This thread has some suggestions about spring admission: http://speechpathology.livejournal.com/450105.html

Haha, sorry! I fetched that from way back using search results. I'm just really curious about what they would say if they called you, particularly since they had professors calling instead of a staff person.

I hope this isn't typical. I'm in a similar boat as you - a bit older than the average student, have had a career going for the past 7 years that I'm now leaving, and I'm interested in adult neurogenic disorders and the neural bases of communication. I went on and on about this interest in my statements. I hope that won't be a negative. Most faculty I spoke with during the process seemed to be encouraging of this interest, so hopefully your experience was an anomaly. I am interested in learning about all aspects of this field, but, like you, I have been in the working world long enough to know what I like and what I don't. I know a school setting is not my thing, and I know I love brains. I only applied to four schools. I am almost done with my CSD prereqs, so my backup plan if I don't get in anywhere involves (among other things) a year of racking up math, biology, chemistry, psychology, and neuroscience credits, plus maybe a language or some computer science, in order to be a better brain researcher in the future.

They actually call everyone who is accepted? Wow. How did that conversation go?

As one of the aforementioned Caucasian females, I bring nothing to the table personally in terms of increasing diversity in the profession, but I agree that it's important. I've participated on some diversity task forces and whatnot over the years, as I've worked in at four universities prior to changing tack and pursuing SLP as a career. In healthcare, it's important for our patients that the health professions begin to resemeble American demographics to some degree. More minorities in healthcare has been shown to correspond to increased access to and satisfaction with healthcare among minority groups. It's an unpleasant truth that lack of diversity among clinicians leads to treatment disparities. For those interested, here is a meta-study by the Department of Health and Human Services on this topic: http://bhpr.hrsa.gov/healthworkforce/reports/diversityreviewevidence.pdf A commitment to diversity has to come from the highest level of an institution to really be transformative, and the reasons why diversity is important have to be articulated throughout the institution. People have to be shown that diversity has a measureable public benefit. It takes skilled and committed leaders to get everyone on board. The University of Texas at Austin recently faced a challenge like this - the President had to articulate a defense of their undergrad admissions policy, which made it to the Supreme Court, knowing full well that he had to get many of the university's donors, regents, and other not-typically-progessive-type folks on board. On the practical side of things, it has been shown universities have to hire more diverse faculty in order to attract more diverse students. Keep that in mind if you are ever in charge of faculty recruitment somewhere. :-) Additionally, programs that want to attract more diverse students have to recruit accordingly. Many schools have fairly involved minority recruitment strategies that involve hosting events targeting minorities, going to minority clubs to present recruitment materials, advertising in majority-minorty markets, creating minority student clubs among their current student group, hiring diverse recruiters, etc. I suspect one of the reasons this hasn't happened in SLP is that most SLP masters programs hardly have to recruit at all! There has been a surge of undergraduate students and graduate school applicants in CSD recently. No department chair is going to allocate a substantial amount of money for any kind of recruitment initiative when there are hordes of applicants beating down their doors! Maybe NSSLHA or other student groups could work with department heads to help with this kind of thing. In one of my CSD classes, on the first day of class, the professor asked the male students in the class to raise their hands. She said she was so glad to have them in her class, and that she hopes they continue with their studies because the profession needs them and their clients need them. I would love to see this kind of thing happen more often. On another note, I disagree with you about salary. I think it is a factor. The money in SLP isn't bad, but it isn't top-tier either. One can make more than what many SLPs make with just a Bachelors in computer sciences, engineering, and geology, business, etc. As far as graduate schooling goes, the bump in salary you see for getting a PharmD or an MBA, for example, is much better than what you get for a Master's in SLP. At schools I'm familiar with, diversity in the pharmacy programs blows social work, nursing, and CSD out of the water. At my current university, it's about 60-40 women to men, and only about 40% white. The SLP program, on the other hand, is almost all women, although it is more ethnically diverse than average for this field. The median salary for a pharmacist is $115K, and it only requires 4 additional years after completion of the pre-pharm credits. Economically, women stand to benefit more from getting a master's degree, on average, which may have something to do with the gender issue in CSD. Or, it could just have more to do with the fact that healthcare (except physicians and administration) is female-dominated. Further thoughts?

It depends on the school. Some state-funded schools have a mandate to educate students of their state. Others are working to attract more out of state students because they add diversity and bring in more tuition money. This can even vary among colleges and schools within a single university. I should disclaim that this is not about SLP specifically. I've worked in higher ed admin at several universities.