Can You Hear Me Now?

Good morning afternoon!

Today's Blogtember Prompt is Describe a distinct moment when your life took a turn.

Since I was a senior in high school, I wanted to be a Speech-Language Pathologist. I wanted to work with stroke and accident victims, administering speech therapy and teaching them how to talk again so they could regain some normalcy in their lives. I decided that I didn't want to work with kids because they were so young and they didn't know what they were missing out on, whereas adults were used to talking their entire lives just to have their voices taken away from them. I wanted to give a voice to those who didn't have one.

When you're an undergrad for Speech Path, you don't only learn about speech stuff.  There are two branches of Communication Sciences --speech and hearing. You need a graduate degree to get a job in either field so I always knew there was even more education ahead. I never wanted anything to do with hearing science (audiology). I thought, "the ear is gross and boring. I wanna help people talk." And I thought this for years. Three years.

Fall semester of last year, I had a really difficult class. It was writing intensive and I could. not. deal. I was working 25-30 hours a week, plus coming home and doing schoolwork after being out of the house for 16 hours. I dropped my availability to just weekends and I still couldn't catch up on my homework. I had a nervous breakdown and after having too many panic attacks in one week, I talked to my parents and then my adviser for advice. I dropped the class that was giving me such a hard time and I felt like a failure. How would I ever survive graduate school when I couldn't handle one stupid undergrad class? I looked at application requirements for graduate programs for speech and seeing the 3.8-4.0 average GPAs of the acceptees, I freaked out.

Then there was a moment of clarity...

I decided to Google audiology and I fell in love.  I wanted to know everything about it -- the anatomy of the ear, hearing aids, sound waves, cochlear implant videos on Youtube. I looked up schools with Audiology programs and found that they were less competitive than the speech ones. The degree is a four-year clinical doctorate(scary!), but I finally found my calling in life.

I'm graduating in January so I'll be attending grad school next Fall. This semester is going to be rough between work, classes, taking the GREs(yikes!), asking for recommendation letters, and applying to the 10 schools I have on my list.

So this is the most long-winded post I've ever written. Here's a baby hearing his parents' voices for the first time. Love it.

Funny how one freak-out can change your whole life.

XO - Monny