After completing my undergraduate education in Linguistics, I wanted to pursue a career working with developmental language disorders. I decided to pursue a Master's degree in Communication Disorders and that opened the door to my current profession as a speech-language pathologist (speech therapist). I currently work in the Boston Public School district working with students aged 10-18, and especially enjoy working clients who struggle with language comprehension and phonological production...
After completing my undergraduate education in Linguistics, I wanted to pursue a career working with developmental language disorders. I decided to pursue a Master's degree in Communication Disorders and that opened the door to my current profession as a speech-language pathologist (speech therapist). I currently work in the Boston Public School district working with students aged 10-18, and especially enjoy working clients who struggle with language comprehension and phonological production difficulties. In the schools, I work with clients with a range of profiles ranging from ADHD, Autism, Aspergers, Down Syndrome, selective mutism, word finding deficits, and sentence formulation difficulties. As a speech-language pathologist, the best part of any week is seeing a student confident and motivated by their progress. It is very important to me to help clients know that they are not "lazy" or "dumb" or "bad students." It's my job to teach them that they simply need to use strategies that best suit their learning styles. And that's when the work begins!
As a student of Linguistics, I studied the fundamentals of language analysis including phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic change, historical language change, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and bilingualism. These are subjects which in many ways underlie every interaction we have with other people, and I find that purely fascinating. Learning Linguistics requires a collaborative approach to best flesh out the nuances in language regarding its form, meaning, and use. For anyone interested in learning Linguistics, it can be a thrilling experience creating theories and thinking through why we see specific features in any given language. Sharing that with an equally interested student is an absolute privilege and joy.
