Crimson Wife

I would try to take a course you haven't already taken since I think that would look better- are there any electives that you didn't do the first time around?

Oh, I hear you both on the trying to juggle school & parenting and the need for a ton of proctored exams. I'm taking 3100 this summer and it's 5 proctored exams, ugh!

Because you as SLP may be the one person out of all the child's numerous therapists and teachers to recognize that his/her articulation errors were "red flags" for hearing loss. My daughter was mixing up consonant pairs and no one put 2 + 2 together except for her school SLP. Everyone else was just relying on the previous normal audiology exam results but the SLP was the one who told me to go get her retested. Thank goodness she did, because that test revealed profound hearing loss that my daughter was compensating for by lipreading.

Northwestern has one. It takes an extra 1-2 years (depending on whether or not you need to take the leveling courses).

Have you taken any pre-med courses? I'm guessing not, and for that reason I think you are VASTLY overestimating how difficult it is to get a decent grade in those courses. Bear in mind that the MEDIAN (as in half score higher, half score lower) is often set to a C+ or B- as a way to weed out all but the smartest and hardest-working students. And unlike the CSD courses I'm taking now, the tests were not multiple choice or true/false but open-ended. My 1st UG alma mater prided itself on an acceptance rate in the high 90's to med school but what they fail to mention is that 50% of entering freshman start out as pre-meds but only 20% go on to med school after graduation. That's a whole lot of really smart kids (SAT's >700 on each section) getting weeded out. I got halfway through and even though I had an ok GPA, I decided that I didn't want to go into medicine badly enough to slog through the rest.

Different majors have different grading scales so it makes it hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison. A 3.5 in a science major is an excellent GPA but in an easier major it wouldn't be. I was pre-med for the first half of my 1st UG degree and I worked WAAAAAY harder for those B's and B+'s in the science courses than I did for A's in psych courses. I only just started my 2nd bachelor's in CSD a few weeks ago so I don't yet have the sense what the grading is going to be like. I'm hoping it'll be more like psych.

I've heard of people getting rejected the first time around and then making a connection that resulted in a successful re-application. But I've never heard of that happening in the same acceptance cycle.

My hubby came out of his grad program with over $100k in loans. He was making more than a SLP is likely to but he was also supporting me and 2 kids. We buckled down and made all sorts of lifestyle sacrifices to get it paid off quickly. We squeezed ourselves into a tiny rental, didn't have a car, had no cable/satellite, never ate out, never bought anything new if we could find it used, etc. etc. It was tough for the first few years after he graduated, but it was worth it to get out from all that debt.

Yes, but I think it matters more when comparing programs that are all strong in a particular area. So for my area of interest (auditory-verbal therapy for the deaf), if I were to get into both Vanderbilt and Akron, then Vanderbilt would definitely open up more doors after graduation. But somebody who graduated from a "name brand" school that didn't have an AVT program would probably lose out to the Akron graduate.

If you're open to working with the D/HoH from the auditory-verbal therapy side of things rather than ASL or "Total Communication", I can give you a list of programs that have that emphasis. Gallaudet is actually NOT on my target schools list because they are well-known to be in the anti-oralism camp. I don't have a dog in the fight for people who are pre-lingually deaf, but my HoH child had normal hearing for at least the first 2 years of life and possibly longer. Spoken English *IS* her primary language and while I'm not opposed to her learning ASL as a 2nd language, that's not my priority.

Different programs have different strengths. Take a look at the research the faculty members at each of the programs are working in to see if your particular area of interest in SLP is well-represented. If my area of interest is X and schools A & B don't have any faculty doing research in that area but school C does, then the fact that school C might be lower on the USNWR ranking list is not a reason to choose A or B. My target schools list would look fairly odd to anyone who wasn't familiar with my area of professional interest.

I don't have any BTDT advice, but switching from an online-only to a classroom-based program seems like it would be an easy thing to explain. "I started the online program but realized that an in-person one would be a better fit for my learning style". I'm doing some online courses through Utah State starting next week and some classroom-based SLP Assistant courses starting next fall. I haven't yet decided whether I'll do the full USU 2nd bachelor's and just the 4 SLPA courses that I'd need for licensing with the 2nd bachelor's or the full SLPA program and just the handful of grad school prereqs not offered at the community college. I'm going to see how the summer and fall terms go and which program is a better fit.

My special needs child sees the SLP at her school the same frequency during the summer term but sessions are shorter (20 min each instead of 30 min). Not every child qualifies for Extended School Year so there are fewer sites in the district. So now that I think about it, some of the SLP's might get the summer off if they're not at a site that has an ESY program. There is a 1 week break in our district between the end of the spring term and the beginning of ESY. Then there is a 3 week break between the end of ESY and the beginning of the fall term. Enough so that families and staff can take vacations but not too long so that the kids start regressing.

If you go into SLP and work in schools, you will have a lot of the same kind of stuff (not the extracurriculars or dorm duties though). Every student will have an Individual Education Plan and you'll need to write goals, progress reports, participate in IEP meetings, etc. You will get paid better, however. SLP's in my district get paid in the high $70k's to low $80k's (they do work summers because of Extended School Year) while teachers make in the $50k's to low $60's. One advantage to SLP vs. classroom teaching is that you won't face pressure regarding standardized test scores. A lot of teachers I know have retired recently because they're so sick of the "all test prep, all the time" that teaching has become in our district.

For ABA, I would look for courses that would count towards board certification. http://www.bacb.com/index.php?page=100358 For teaching the D/HoH, look for programs with CED accreditation: http://councilondeafed.org/accreditation/ SPED you would need to check with your state's teacher certification department as each state has its own requirements. Ed therapy is another field to consider. The Academic Language Therapy Association has a well-respected certification program: https://www.altaread.org/membership.asp

I wouldn't take calculus unless for some reason you needed to take a calculus-based physics course. I was pre-med for the freshman and sophomore years of my 1st undergrad degree and calculus & physics are HARD! Definitely not courses to do unless you're required to if want to maintain a high GPA. My cumulative GPA was respectable but that's only because I did well in all my other courses.

I did go to the local urgent care center (my HMO insurance refused to cover it) and had the blood drawn for the titer. It only cost me $54, which sadly enough is peanuts compared to all the other costs I'm going to be having over the next few years. The HMO will pay for booster shots if it turns out I need them.

I want to get the SLPA license so that I have more options. I haven't yet decided whether I will do the full 2nd bachelor's plus just the 4 SLPA courses or the full SLPA program plus the upper-level grad school pre-reqs not offered by the community college at USU. I don't have to make a choice right away so I'm going to see how summer and fall terms go.

The GRE general test doesn't have calculus per the ETS. Were you perhaps looking at the subject test? https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/quantitative_reasoning/

I got my USU 2nd bachelor's acceptance today. Brynne Davies told me the other day that she had a stack of them on her desk to process so congrats to everyone else who got accepted!

I'm trying to get my ducks in a row for fall. The SLP Asst. program I'm starting requires Hep B immunization and a recent TDaP booster so I went and got those today. One of hospitals where I could possibly get placed for the practicum wants blood titers as proof of immunity against measles and chicken pox. Before I go out and pay for the blood titers I'm wondering if this is a common requirement. The elementary school where I volunteer as literacy tutor was fine with my immunization records and a signed statement that I had chicken pox as a kid. Has it been your experience that places want blood titers as proof of immunity?

Studying Latin & Greek roots really helped me improve my vocabulary. If you know the roots that will give you a clue as to the general gist of it even if you don't know the specific meaning. For example, one Latin root that is particularly relevant to us as future SLP's is "audi". Any time you see that as part of a word, you know it has something to do with hearing. English from the Roots Up has flashcards that are good for memorizing the roots: http://www.rainbowresource.com/prodlist.php?subject=Spelling%2FVocabulary&category=English+From+the+Roots+Up I haven't retaken the GRE yet but back in the day I got a 750 on my SAT-V and a 720 on my (sadly expired) GRE-V. That would be the equivalent of a 168 on the new scale.

I'm not a huge fan of online courses, but USU has a strong program in my area of interest (listening and spoken language for the deaf) and when I started reading through the profiles of the current grad students, every single one of them had a 1st or 2nd degree from USU. So I figured that if I wanted to have a shot at it, I should take the upper level pre-reqs through USU rather than Sacramento State or CSUN online. I'm probably the odd Californian out in that I'm NOT targeting the CSU's. My possible target schools list would probably look pretty strange to someone who didn't know anything about auditory-verbal therapy. It's a specialized field and most SLP programs don't offer it (even at universities that also have hospitals doing cochlear implants and audiology schools).

USU online has a June 1st deadline for the fall but if you miss that, you can take your 1st semester as a non-degree student while waiting for your acceptance. I'm taking a couple courses this summer (starts May 11th) as a non-degree student and have an application pending for the fall.

Another program offering a concentration in AVT, specifically for patients with cochlear implants is University of South Carolina: http://www.sph.sc.edu/comd/avt.htm