During my STEP Signature Project, I was able to intern at a Coastal Speech Therapy in Jacksonville, North Carolina. I was able to sit in on patient sessions and interact with them during activities.
Throughout my time participating in my STEP Signature Project I have realized many different things about myself and people around me. For my future, I plan to become a Pediatric Speech Language Pathologist who specializes in areas of Autism and other developmental disorders. Through completing my internship, I was able to really appreciate the work that SLP’s do and really dive into the work that I will one day be doing. Going into this internship I was unsure what area I wanted to specialize in but I was really able to find an area that extremely intrigued me.
IN completing my STEP Signature Project at Coastal Speech Therapy, I was able to see and interact with many different patients. Patients ranged from those who were children with simple linguistic deficiencies to adults who had suffered either a traumatic brain injury or stroke. Throughout my undergraduate career I have learned more about myself and what I want to do when I graduate, but this experience really excelled and cemented my direction.
As an entering freshman in 2017, I struggled with the direction I wanted to go when I was finally post-grad. I knew that I wanted to make a difference in some aspect of the medical field but I never knew exactly where. At OSU, I was able to be apart and sit in on the Aphasia Initiative, which is a program that helps mainly adults who have suffered from a Traumatic Brain Injury or Stroke. While it was an amazing experience, I wanted to see the other end of the SLP field and chose to intern at a clinic that was mainly pediatric patients for my STEP Signature Project.
One of the key things that really transformed me was being able to see the changes that our patients went through in weeks or even days of just working with them. Working with children is such a rewarding experience because they get so excited about the littlest things that it makes you really step back and appreciate life. As adults, we get so caught up in the fast pace that stepping back really is rewarding. With a few patients, we were able to see major progress in patients with some language difficulties.
Like I said in my previous section, this change was so significant because I realized what I actually wanted to do with my future career. It is not only beneficial to me to be able to see progress in the patients we work with but to see the excitement in the patients and their parents when they see the changes in everyday life. This simple aspect is really what brought me to this career, my biggest factor in choosing a career is how I can use my strengths to help those around me.
In