In my current internship, I serve as an SLP to children ranging from grades pre-K through 12. Thus far, my experience has primarily been in the areas of assessing and treating speech-sound disorders. Additional areas of focus include expressive/receptive language, social communication, and fluency. This internship consists of full-time hours.

At this placement, I worked primarily on an inpatient rehabilitation unit developing intensive treatment plans centering linguistic, cognitive, and/or feeding/swallowing deficits. In addition to conducting rehabilitation sessions, I spent time on acute care administering cognitive-linguistic evaluations, assessing chewing/swallowing function, making diet recommendations, and providing bedside treatment. I was responsible for documentation of all of the aforementioned assessment and treatment practices. During my time at SSM, I also had the opportunity to participate is several Modified Barium Swallow Studies (MBSS) and Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation (NMES) dysphagia therapy. This internship consisted of full-time hours.

As a student clinician, I conducted assessment and treatment centering articulation, phonology, morphology, semantics, literacy, pragmatics, and more! Assessment procedures at university clinics also included conduction of hearing screenings in order to rule out hearing impairment as a confounding variable in individuals presenting with linguistic deficits. During my time at SIUC, I had the privilege of acting as a speech-language clinician at the university's Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders (CASD) for two semesters. The CASD language and learning group provides early intervention services to children (aged 2-5 years) diagnosed with ASD, with particular focus on functional communication and social engagement with familiar adults and same-age peers. Working at CASD was a unique interprofessional experience as we worked closely with applied behavior analysis (ABA) students to develop comprehensive, consistent treatment plans and practices.