Since I began my undergraduate journey as a Communication Sciences and Disorders major as a freshman, I can’t help but notice how much the department has grown. It seems like everywhere I turn there’s someone else from my major. And since there’s so many of us, there’s a lot we have in common.
- Your major has multiple names. Communication disorders, communication sciences and disorders, speech pathology, speech therapy, and almost all of them are met with same blank stare from outsiders. And usually, before you can get the full “communication disorders” out, someone is already saying, “Oh communications? My roommate’s in that too, maybe you know them!” Maybe, but probably not because my major is communication DISORDERS.
- You could label the parts of a larynx in your sleep. The amount of times you have memorized the parts of the larynx are innumerable. Yeah, I know that the cricothyroid muscles are between the thyroid cartilage and cricoid cartilage, who doesn’t?
- Making sounds out loud in class to determine where in the vocal tract a sound is made is a given. And don’t even get me started on trying to quietly figure out if a sound is voiced or unvoiced while doing your phonetics homework.
- You’re thinking about grad school on your first day as an undergrad. And pretty much every spare moment you have from then on out, whether it’s in terms of your GPA, what program you will apply to, or how many you’ll apply to, grad school is constantly on your mind.
- There’s one token guy in every single one of your classes. Often no more and no less than just one lone guy with all the girls, but hey, more power to them!
- There’s basically the same people in all of your classes. Sure, speech pathology is a growing field, but you’ll almost definitely have the same classes, major related and otherwise, with the same people for the next four years.
- If nothing else you will always remember the definition of a phoneme and a morpheme. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound and a morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning and you will never ever forget it.
- You notice how people talk. You may not to be able to diagnosis them yet, but you notice they use the unvoiced /th/ sound where the voiced /th/ sound should be and man do you want to correct them about it.
- Your study guides are short novels. Notes, on notes, on notes and if you’re missing even the smallest thing, nothing you’ve been studying even remotely makes sense.
- You can’t wait until the day you can actually practice. You know that when it’s all said and done, the best day of all will be when you can finally practice as a speech-language pathologist, whether you work with children, in geriatrics, in a hospital, or on the research end of it, you know already how rewarding this career will someday be.
The second you tell someone you want to be a speech therapist, they immediately tell you that you’ll easily find a job someday. And you hope so, because you’ve been working your butt off to get your degree. Good luck to all my fellow communication disorder majors out there; may no one ever confuse you for a communications major again.
