In November 2022, some of our graduate students in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences (then Communication Disorders) participated in Holyoke High School’s “You Can Be Anything You Want to Be” Career Day held in partnership with the United States Attorney’s Office District of Massachusetts as part of the Department of Justice’s nationwide Project Safe Neighborhoods initiative. You may have seen the story about this in our school’s newsletter:
https://www.umass.edu/public-health-sciences/news/inspiration-high-school-career-day
It gives a nice description and summary of the event and is well worth reading. But here I want to present the students’ voices in their entirety along with some more photos from the event:
“We were invited to present at Holyoke High School at the “You can be anything you want day,” where students learned about different career opportunities. The activity consisted of doing a short presentation for seven groups of students. After explaining to the students our role in the medical field, we presented a brief case study. They collaborated with us in identifying the treatment, tools, and professionals we would need to assess and treat the person described in the case. Students were engaged in the activity, and some were asking questions regarding the cases and how to become speech-language pathologists or audiologists. I hope these activities keep happening in the community so we can increase diversity in our field.” – Ada Lopes Gonzalez, Ph.D. student, SLP
“Although this past November was my first time being at Holyoke High School, there was a sense of familiarity in being there. Holyoke’s demographic is made up of low-income families and has a large Hispanic/Latino population.
Fortunately, and to my surprise, there were at least a handful of students who seemed interested in both speech language pathology and audiology— although many didn’t know what the fields entailed to begin with.
Although us as grad students were there for the high school students, it was encouraging and inspiring for me personally to see a new group of young minds interested in fields that are often overlooked or generally unknown. I also discovered the field of audiology in high school, but didn’t see many professionals who looked like me. My hope in being there is that the students were further encouraged to pursue interests with a sense of inclusion and purpose.” – Kimberlee Moïse, Au.D. student
“From this outreach event I learned that not many high schoolers have an idea of what communication disorders is and how professionals in these fields serve as healthcare professionals. I could see many students were surprised and intrigued by both audiology and speech pathology. As an audiology student, this experience gave me the opportunity to be a career educator for the day. Communication disorders is a field that is rapidly growing and always in need of new professionals. Through talking about both audiology and speech pathology, I grew in my public speaking skills and my ability to communicate about the ins-and-outs of how important our role is to the community. I discovered the field when I was still in high school and so hope that we were able to ignite that excitement in the students who attended the “You Can Be Anything You Want to Be” career event.” – Anna-Maria D’Ambra, Au.D. student
