Observation Hours

[Demjc24]

So I'm starting to second-guess my observation hours. I graduated with my B.S. in Communication Sciences and Disorders and the 25 observation hours were a requirement of one of my classes. However, we were able to observe the current graduate students in our on-campus clinic under the supervision of the clinical director, who is a licensed SLP. I'm now concerned that my observation hours won't count, because obviously the graduate students I observed didn't have their CCC's yet. We were told that these hours would count towards the requirement by the professor and clinical director, but now I am a little worried that the schools I applied to won't accept these. Did anyone else do something similar to this? If so, did it have an affect anything? I'm applying to Spring 2015, and all of my applications are submitted. I am just stressing that this may hurt my chances of being accepted. Thanks for your help!!

[OverCaffeinated]

i dunno about graduate students, but u dont feel like 25 is low?

im gonna have about 400 by the time i apply...

however i am not sure how these hours (inlcude observation and work with actual patients) are compared against a good GPA...

[Missthang]

We do this same thing at my university. The university clinic (observing grad students) was only 1 of our settings, but we still had to observe 3 other types of setting such as hospital, public school, private school, private practice, etc. Mine counted and it didn't matter that the majority of my 25 hrs came from, just as long as I had a could hours in at least 4 different types and min. of 25 total. The only snag in this is making sure the clinical educator, director, whoever is signing off on these hours has a current license in the state and through ASHA (which if they're a staff member at a university I'm sure it would be nearly impossible for this to be an issue).

[hopefulspeechie16]

Do you have to do volunteer placements with adult and child populations or is just one or the other okay?

[Missthang]

I think it'll almost be impossible to do just one or another bc of the type of settings. Some settings off the top of my head are hospital (A or C), public school ©, private school ©, university clinic (A or C), home health (A or C), private practice (A or C) and I'm sure there's a few others I'm missing... It will look better if you observe both adults and children because when you go to grad school, you will have to work with both even if you think you know that you absolutely want to work with one population and not the other. You must receive so many types of hours in the "Big Nine" areas and so many hours evaluating and treating adults AND children in all of these areas. By getting observation hours with both types of populations and in a variety of settings, you are experiencing a little bit of everything that SLPs can do since you'll have to experience it all in grad school (and also be tested on it all for the praxis).

[rlywrmn]

We do the same type of thing at my university, observing graduate students who are supervised by a licensed professor. I have many friends who have moved onto SLP graduate programs with those type of observation hours and they have had no trouble with it! I think a lot of universities do that. 

I know we offer a handful of different settings and that is definitely one of them that counts.

Hope this helps, and good luck with everything!

[GandalfTheGrey]

When a graduate student provides services under the supervision of an ASHA certified practitioner, the ASHA-certified SLP is ethically responsible for those services and is legally considered the service provider even if the grad student is the only one in the room with the client. So observing an appropriately-supervised grad student absolutely counts towards your observation hours if the supervisor signs off.

 

That said, I would strongly recommend observing experienced clinicians for your own benefit before you enter graduate school. When I observed graduate students, I found it easy to identify each clinician's areas of strength and weaknesses (often the weaknesses were most prominent if this was a first-semester clinician), while observing experienced clinicians gave me lots of ideas about behavior management, how to teach a complex skill, and effective ways to transition clients.