What major are you?

SLHS.

What's that?

It stands for Speech, Language, Hearing Sciences!

Oh, Okay... What do you do with that?

That is how most conversations go for me and someone who asks me what my major is, so I thought I would write about my major a little bit to let the world know about this career path.

SLHS stands for Speech, Language, Hearing Sciences. We learn about all the disorders that can affect someone's speech, language, and/or hearing. As an undergrad, we learn about both speech and hearing because who really knows what area of SLHS you want to go into at 18 years old? We also take linguistics classes because we need to understand language, hence having language in our major name.

So, you may ask, "what kind of jobs can you get with this major?" Well let me tell you, you can get a ton of different kinds of jobs with this degree. Some may require a graduate degree, but others don't. The two main paths you can take is to be a speech pathologist or an audiologist. You take both kinds of classes as an undergrad, but have to choose by graduate school.

Speech pathology is being a specialist to help people with speech problems, and give them guidance on how to improve speech, fluency, vocabulary, and so many other things. There are some that focus on voice disorders like having vocal nodules and others who may have patients who have had a stroke. There are tons of disciplines SLPs can get into.

Audiologists are specialists on the ear. So they can assist people with hearing aids, or children and adults who are deaf. There's also a lot of disciplines audiologists can go into.

Both have a wide range of jobs. Yes, both do require an intensive graduate program that usually lasts two years for Speech Pathology and three years for Audiology, but the end result is amazing. You will come out being knowledgeable about every topic within that program.

Other jobs that you can do with a SLHS degree include; elementary school teacher, special education teacher, teaching English as a second language, hearing aid specialist, speech language pathologist assistant, and much more. Most all of these do not involve a graduate degree to get a job! Most only need a certificate that most people can take with their undergraduate degree or take for one year after undergrad.

Being an SLHS major is a hard degree to earn because of all the knowledge you need to learn and the amount of classes you take. Some people are better at the speech side of things while others are better at the hearing classes. This major requires you to be good at both and it prepares you for either discipline.

One perk of being an SLHS major is that there are not a ton of people who do it, so you make great friends with most everyone in your major.