college

Minor changes or major changes?

Yep, that was the question.

At the beginning of speech class called applied phonetics, our teacher sat in front of us and shared that of the 100 people in the class, only 15 would make it into the master’s program. She advised to have another option in mind. I thought about that for a week or so, as I knew it was competitive but didn’t realize how extremely competitive it is – figured if I had the 3.7 GPA I was fine. As the week went on I got more nervous about it, wondering if I should change something, so Wednesday of this week I went to see one of the advisors.

My one advisor is a former speech therapist of Chris’s and a very nice person that we have known for years. I have not yet met with my formal advisor for me with senior status, but just meeting with her gave me more insight, though she encouraged me to still meet with the senior advisor. She thought in my situation I would be very wise to choose a different major and then pursue the speech pathology as a master after graduating with a degree that could be used as a job.

I thought all of this over. I am not really a wimp (lol) and had to decide if I should really just drop out of this degree at this point (after finishing this semester) or if I should see it through and apply for the master’s. However, I am not as young as I was, with three years to gamble on whether I will be able to get farther in a degree that has no future as a bachelor’s. If I do a different, marketable degree, then I could be employed in that field in three years, and then possibly get employee tuition reimbursement to go for my master’s! So I decided to make a major change. But it is was not because I don’t like my classes, or think that I can’t do well enough.

After researching for a day I emailed some chairs of departments and set about to decide between the bachelor’s degrees of Special Education, Deafness Education, ASL (American Sign Language), and Psychology (though I thought there was a fifth? Oh well…). Once I narrowed down more about each degree, I thought that the course requirements in the Special Education (Moderate to Severe) were most fitting to what I was trying to accomplish, with courses such as Applied Behavior Analysis, American Sign Language, and Speech and Language Development being a part of the listed courses.

I don’t want to be a teacher standing in the front of the class though – I hope I can be a one-on-one or maybe a home schooling teacher where you teach virtually. And I definitely want to work with individuals with autism/and/or deafness.

So Monday I will be turning in my program of study form (or before if I can do online) in preparation for the registration date of October 10. God willing, I will still get my master’s in speech after I’m done with this, but good grief, I’m actually getting a teaching degree! Wow! It’s not anything I pictured myself doing . . .

 

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