In class the other day, my professor announced a guest speaker. I looked at my classmates on either side of me and sighed. More often than not, I find guest speakers to be boring and a waste of my time. On occasion, I find myself really listening to guest speakers and following along attentively with what they have to say. To my surprise, the guest speaker in class that day, Dustin Giannelli, was exactly what I was not expecting. He started by telling us that he has a background in sales and marketing and graduated from Paul College at the University of New Hampshire. I could not help but wonder what a guy with a background in business could provide for students studying speech pathology, but I was quickly proven wrong. Dustin has been deaf and wearing hearing aids since he was 5-years-old, and uses his degree and passion to advocate for people with disabilities. What had a lasting impact on me specifically was that people living with disabilities make up 17% of the population, yet only 5% of businesses make products that are inclusive of people with disabilities. He went on to tell us the impact that speech-language pathologists and audiologists have had on his life. He kept telling us throughout his speech that the key to life is communication and the key to communication is access. Yet, many people are living without the correct resources to access education. Dustin was lucky enough to have a great support system including his parents and a team of specialists that helped him find that access. He shared his “why” for doing what he does, telling us that he never wants to see another child like himself without access to communication and having to go through life pretending to be like the other kids.
After the presentation, I started to think of my “why” for doing what I’m doing. When I was a senior in high school, I shadowed a fifth-grade elementary school teacher in my hometown. Because I was a camp counselor in my town, I already knew a lot of the kids. On one of my days of shadowing, the teacher asked me if I wanted to spend the day with the school’s speech pathologist. Only hearing of speech pathology one other time, I figured I’d give it a shot. I remembered how my camp supervisor had told me that I would make a great speech pathologist, and not knowing what that was, especially at 16-years-old, I kind of just brushed it off. I quickly realized how much of a rewarding profession it was, seeing the smiles on kids’ faces when they finally started to nail a certain sound they previously struggled with. Seeing a few kids from camp in the classroom struggling with their communication and language skills was a whole different ball game than seeing them struggle with their speech on the playground. Their communication difficulties were not something I was even paying attention to while playing a game of freeze tag. It was a much more noticeable challenge in the classroom and something I really started to pay attention to. I have always known I wanted to work with children, but it was not until that moment that I knew I wanted to be a speech pathologist. Now after hearing Dustin speak to my class of aspiring SLPs and audiologists, I can see how the kids’ access to communication right before my eyes was one of the greatest things I’ve ever gotten to be a part of.