<p>What would be the appropriate undergrad major for someone interested in getting a Masters in Speech Pathology?</p>
<p>Hi Mom60!</p>
<p>Okay, obviously Speech & Audiology is the first logical choice. I would also add:</p>
<p>Biology
Linguistics
English, Minor in Bio
Psychology, Sociology
Math</p>
<p>Probably others too that I haven’t thought of yet. That’s all I can think of off the top of my head at the moment. Let’s see what others say!</p>
<p>Taken from Princeton Review: Most incoming candidates have a bachelors degree in speech-language pathology or audiology. However, this is rarely an absolute requirement, or it can be substituted with credits in biology, physical science, mathematics, behavioral and/or social sciences, and speech and language development.</p>
<p>I would imagine that linguistics, psychology and human anatomy classes would be helpful.</p>
<p>If you don’t have a bachelors degree in speech pathology, you will need to be sure you have taken the prerequisite courses to be considered for enrollment as a graduate student. If you don’t have all the required prerequisite courses and others applying DO have these courses you might be at a disadvantage when applying for grad admissions. In addition, you will need to take them before you can fulfill the requirements for your masters degree. The masters program for a speech pathologist is a two year program. If you have to add prerequisite courses you will need to consider that it will take you longer than the two years to complete this course of study for a masters degree.</p>
<p>I will add (I am a speech pathologist) that admissions to graduate programs in speech pathology are highly competitive. There are NOT enough openings in the grad programs for all of the students who apply, all of the students with undergrad degrees in speech pathology, and the like.</p>
<p>I would suggest that you look on the American Speech Language Hearing Association website. There is a nice section there for prospective students. You might gain some good information from this.</p>
<p>In addition, you might want to contact some grad programs in speech pathology (perhaps public universities in your state) to find out what courses they require for consideration for admissions to their graduate programs.</p>
<p>It’s a GREAT profession. Good luck to you.</p>
<p>My SIL has suggested speech pathology or OT as fields for my D to explore. She has offered for my D to shadow the speech therapist and OT who work for her. SIL is a pediatric PT who owns her own company that works with kids 0-3 yrs.
From a quick look at schools on D’s list most don’t offer speech and language as a major. The local UC does offer it as a minor or as part of an individualed plan of study where the student picks three areas of study and makes their own major with one component being speech and language.
I was surprised that Cal Poly SLO doesn’t offer a pre-speech pathology course of study.
<a href=“http://www.asha.org/careers/professions/infocoll.htm[/url]”>http://www.asha.org/careers/professions/infocoll.htm</a> Adding the link to the site Thumper suggested.</p>
<p>It looks like CSU Northridge offers both grad and undergrad speech path programs. U of the Pacific does too (I think). A number of other CSUs offer speech path programs but it’s unclear whether these are grad or undergrad. I think I heard that Chapman does as well.</p>
<p>thumper1- S just graduated from University of the Pacific and they do have a program. UOP is not on her list of schools but it might be worth considering.
She doesn’t know what she wants. She has considered Vet, MFT (marriage, family therapist), neurologist, pharmacist. Vet has been crossed off the list. I don’t see her doing the MD route. We are encouraging her to do some career exploration this summer.
Her present school list includes-
Univ of Vermont
Univ of Ca Santa Barbara
UC Davis
Cal Poly SLO
Seattle University
Western Washington
Univ Colorado Boulder
Colorado State Univ
Or attend the local CC for two years and transfer
It looks like most of the public programs in Ca are at Cal States. She doesn’t have any Cal States on her list. She considered them below her academically but I think if she likes the idea of OT or Speech she will need to consider some of them.</p>
<p>I thought I remembered that your D had UVM on her list! Why is that? Something to do with horse riding if I remember correctly? Wow, tough choices in narrowing down college choices for majors or for hobbies. Does she want a career in her hobby of horse riding?</p>
<p>chocchipcookie- Vermont is her dream school. Not sure why since she has never been to Vermont or anywhere near Vermont. She likes that they have snowboarding nearby, equestrian team, the size of the school feels right, not huge but not small. She thinks Vermont will have casual laidback people. The only drawback she sees to Vermont is that it is very far from home and getting back and forth will be difficult and expensive. She is my homebody and I have my doubts she will end up going so far from home.
She is realistic that making a living in the horse field is difficult unless you have a ton of money to begin with. If she stays local she can work through college as an assistant horse trainer. Her present trainer would love for her to stay in town for college and teach riding to the young girls.
I think the first step this summer will be to have her do some serious job shadowing.</p>
<p>You can tell your daughter that the rigor of a speech pathology program at a CSU will be very similar to the rigor at a more competitive school. The course of study in speech path isn’t a particularly easy one at ANY college. Once she is an accepted major in speech pathology, she will be spending precious little time outside of that department.</p>
<p>Audiologist here.</p>
<p>Agreed: Go to an undergrad school and major in Audiology and Speech Sciences or whatever the school calls it. (ie- Communication disorders…)</p>
<p>OT or PT- apply to a 5 year program as an undergrad</p>
<p>Disagree with thumper1: As a bio major, turned speech and audiology undergrad, my opinion is that undergrad speech major is pretty easy. It is very straight forward. A couple of somewhat difficult courses but that is all (physiology and physics were the only classes that required much effort.) Plenty of time for fun and a job if she wants one. (Others can weigh in on this). On the other hand, grad school is very time consuming.</p>
<p>If daughter is pursuing speech path as a career (and she’ll have the choice to attend grad school in Audiology or Speech with the speech major undergrad) I would highly recommend she get a teachers license (minor and student teaching?) undergrad also so she has the option of working in a school district.</p>
<p>Crazed…it probably depends on the program. I got my degrees in the midwest…many very fine speech path programs there. Between anatomy, physics, statistics, the speech science courses, linguistics, etc…I thought it was a challenging course of study. And in my program, if you didn’t maintain a 3.0 GPA,they politely asked you to switch major.</p>
<p>There really isn’t a lot you can do with a bachelors in speech pathology. Some states will allow you to be a speech therapy assistant but you cannot get licensure or certification in most states (actually I think it’s all now) without a masters degree in the field.</p>
<p>Doing a double major in another field of education would be very difficult…would require completing both student teaching AND the clinical requirements for the SLP program.</p>
<p>However, for OT Cal Poly SLO does offer Kinesiology with an ICS (Independent Course Study) for occupational therapy. My daughter is in this concentration.</p>
<p>**mom60 wrote:</p>
<p>My SIL has suggested speech pathology or OT as fields for my D to explore. She has offered for my D to shadow the speech therapist and OT who work for her. SIL is a pediatric PT who owns her own company that works with kids 0-3 yrs.
From a quick look at schools on D’s list most don’t offer speech and language as a major. The local UC does offer it as a minor or as part of an individualed plan of study where the student picks three areas of study and makes their own major with one component being speech and language.
I was surprised that Cal Poly SLO doesn’t offer a pre-speech pathology course of study.**</p>
<p>**Crazed said:</p>
<p>OT or PT- apply to a 5 year program as an undergrad**</p>
<p>My daughter had been accepted to USC with the intentions of getting her Bachelors to Masters in OT. However, it was just too expensive, even though she would go 5 years instead of six. Cal Poly is more affordable. She can then apply to OT grad programs, and many of them less costly than USC.</p>
<p>Thumper and other comments are spot on…As another SLP, if I had it to do over, I would take more electives in business in addition to my speech therapy major. The courses that I did take have really helped in private practice, and would assist you in understanding the critical role that finance plays in any setting.</p>
<p>Let me clarify my post about the rigor of the courses. Whether you think speech pathology undergrad is easy or hard is not the issue (my daughter was an engineering major who would argue that engineering was easy). The issue is that the rigor of the course of study would be about the same regardless of the college you attend. If you think courses like anatomy, physics, acoustics, linguistics, language development, etc are easy…you will find them similarly “easy” at most any school.</p>
<p>I think what crazed meant is a credential in speech therapy as well as the work for a preliminary license in speech therapy. Some programs have two different preparation tracks - if so, it is a great move to do the requirements to qualify for both a credential and a license so that you can work in any setting as time goes by. The average SLP is a woman. It is great to be able to shift settings based on your family needs, as jobs are easy to come by once you have your license, and you can then “flex” your setting to meet your current personal needs. </p>
<p>In my years of hiring SLPs, I have never come across one that came out of school with a credential in (for example) special education AND speech therapy. I have know several people who finished undergrad with a degree in speech, couldn’t get into a grad program quickly, so returned to school and got a credential in special education and became either a special education teacher or a resource teacher (pulls out students in small groups to work on reading and writing in a school setting). The job market for special ed teachers and resource teachers is still pretty good in my area of CA, although not as good as OTs or speech therapists. </p>
<p>Take seriously the comments about grad school being challenging to get into - many undergrads not only work their tails off to get great grades, but also do volunteer work or other activities to strengthen their clinical skills and resume for grad school.</p>
<p>And to weigh in on the ease of curriculum, I went to two great schools and found the coursework equally challenging. I got better grades in grad school because the courses were all in my area of interest and I had much better study skills, but I don’t think one was easier than the other. One thing I did right that has served me well was I carefully evaluated the value of each course I was taking, and tried my best to squeeze every bit of knowledge out that I could. The required education courses were sometimes too theoretical for my taste (e.g. the class in cultural studies was about the history of the civil war, etc when what I needed was practical knowledge in how to best reach parents and kids from different cultures and evaluate their skills). Three times during grad school, I went to the professor, explained the knowledge I needed and my motivation, and convinced them to let me do the work “independent study.” I firmly believe in this long range approach, and found the professors (except one) extremely open to my passion about their subject. I finished grad school as the only student who had a notebook on speech/language and cultural differences (now a standard) and a full semester course on counselling parents of kids with autism (also now standard). Be assertive in your own education!!! And try to sandwich in some business courses - wish I had taken more!</p>
<p>2Leashes- thanks for the info on Cal Poly. The OT and Speech pathologist she would shadow are up in that area.
Shoot4Moon- the business course suggestion is a good one. For my SIL who has her own business the business side of her work has been the most difficult. When she started her business she did the PT work and she had a partner who handled all the other stuff. The partnership disolved and my SIL has had to adjust.
First step is getting the shadowing started so my D can finalize her school list. Of course schools don’t seem to have both Pre-Ot and speech and language disorders.</p>
<p>I’m currently taking “leveling” courses (aka prereqs) in order to apply for a Masters in Communicative Disorders at CSU, Dominguez Hills. Most schools actually offer these prereqs, or have similar programs in southern California: CSU, Fullerton, Chapman University, etc. and they are between 10-12 classes depending on where you go, so it should take approximately anywhere between 1 yr (Chapman) to 2-2.5 years (CSUDH). Then apply for a Masters program and hope you get accepted! I’m about to take my GRE exam (new version) and have been researching schools. It’s disheartening when most schools only accept 20 students or less per year, when most school districts have such a hard time filling these positions!</p>
<p>My son is a Speech Language Pathology major for his undergrad degree. His school offers an accelerated, one year MS program in SLP that you must apply to during your third year. Your daughter may want to look at schools that offer accelerated programs as it sounds like the things she is considering require a Masters to practice.</p>