Episode 6 l Season 1: Our Clinical Fellowship Year experiences & how they have shaped us

Highlights from this episode:

In the highlights section we will be choosing one word, one idea, one feeling that we are taking away from each conversation.

Self-worth - value your time!

Advocacy

Balance

Transcript

hi so we're here for episode six and let's talk about our clinical fellowship years i am so excited to hear your stories um mine was a little bit different as usual so i don't know if you guys want me to go first um how are you guys doing yeah you can go first this time if you don't mind okay so i am an anomaly you know everybody says like go plan and apply ahead of in advance um i applied for my job in july and school started you know my job started in august

it was so fast and furious i think you're getting the theme of my life just kind of jump into things um i applied for a bilingual slp position at my current job i've been here the whole time i haven't worked anywhere else i've worked in other places but i haven't left so through the school years i've always come back and in the summers i've done different things but i applied i interviewed and within the hour they called me and told me i was hired so i've been here ever since and i know that my bilingualism was a leg up for sure they they had a bilingual slp here she had a phd and she was an awesome mentor to me um but she was getting ready to retire so they were really wanting to get another bilingual slp to come in so they would have someone when she was ready to retire so my cf year was really interesting i was in a middle school i had a high school slp as my cf um supervisor and then i had that bilingual slp as my mentor so i got to i got both experiences um and kind of just bringing in what we were talking about last episode it was my year of saying yes to everything wanting to help everybody i was 24 years old i was a newlywed just once again inexperienced immature just wanting to do it all help everybody and didn't know how to say no and i ended up just feeling really burned out i think my thanksgiving so i started working in august and then i was planning a wedding i got married in november i don't recommend i do not recommend planning a wedding through grad school planning a wedding through your fellowship year and i remember sitting in the on the couch on thanksgiving morning everybody's watching a game making food and i'm writing my notes i'm working on reports when i have like days off you know all weekend long and just feeling like oh this is not how it's supposed to be but i thought okay everything takes me longer you know i'm brand new so this make this year a wash and just start being a little bit more organized like it was all me internalizing you know never looking at external factors that were causing me to be this busy and having to work so much outside of my contract hours i wasn't in that position yet it was all like well i'm too slow at report writing i'm too slow at writing my goals i'm too slow at taking data i'm too slow at finding resources so i feel like i had internalized a lot of that and i was just really thankful for my mentors uh particularly my supervisor she would literally field the emails that were coming at me because of course people loved it that i said yes right so more and more like oh you're bilingual let's screen these people oh you're bilingual take on this client oh your're bilingual come to this screening and she's like nope ingrid has a position in the middle school and you do not need to be pulling her away from it like she would step in and show me how it was okay to say no and that it would nobody would die if i said no it would be okay so i kind of learned from her that later on that year and uh ended my i feel like i ended it strong and ready to be back um i even worked summer school that year too i worked yeah it was a lot like that's a lot so that's the only year i break summer school first and last first and last but yeah i have a good experience and my both of my mentors my supervisor and my mentor are retired now um i'm in contact maybe just through social media here and there but it's been 10 years so they're both retired and just very thankful for the experience and obviously i'm i'm still here so it was a good place for me and i have the rare luxury of having a bilingual slp as my mentor which i've learned that's not the case and we have placement so DESI: unicorn situation LIZA: always with ingrid INGRID: sorry LIZA: i think i think you're just like you're just a bright light you know when you attract the right people whether it's professors mentors i would have thought i would have found it here in the middle of nowhere new mexico you know like you go to these big cities you would think it's more likely but LIZA: even finding a mentor who teaches you good boundaries like that's that's very big a lot of us are still struggling with that years into the to the field DESI: yeah seriously INGRID: what was your cf like desi yours was a lot more recently than mine DESI: yeah um so my cf um actually was pretty um interesting and specific to where i live so i live in the state of maine um and maine um i knew well sorry let me go back i knew i wanted to work with early childhood uh i preschoolers are my jam um even though they're a little bit kooky um but i um so i found an agency that contracted with child development services child development services is the branch of the department of education here in the state of maine that provides preschool age services to these children or you know just sped generally the state has not yet incorporated that that age group um into their part b you know school based delivery model um it's still mostly um managed by like head starts you know some public preschools and then um a lot of special purpose private schools for children um who need more support so my employer um it was a private practice um situation agency where they contracted with them so most of my kids were preschool but i had some middle schoolers and some high schoolers and i had one client who was in her 20s um but used aac as her modality um so i would say that most of my kids were um non-speaking um or minimally speaking and so my job was driving to see them and doing this kind of tetris with my schedule uh so i could get to them um and so my by the nature of the of my contract with this company um you know there was a productivity standard so i i was like you i had to say yes so okay you have this other kid they're here in the middle of nowhere you know or oh look at that special purpose private school that you go to they've incorporated another kid that kid needs speech therapy pick them up um so it was always a constantly shifting schedule um which made it challenging and i think the thing that really made my cf year stand out um was that i um i was actually pregnant uh for the majority of my cf yes so um i found out i was pregnant in september and so um i had my son in april um and so i was yeah chasing kids on the floor with kids um you know eight nine months pregnant and driving and driving yeah so i was um i i did have this one my cf uh experience really culminated um with like one this one last iep meeting i had and um it was a case of a child that basically um just did not have adequate supports in place wasn't ready to transition to kindergarten or you know we just didn't have i was basically one of the primary sources of information at this meeting um and i just didn't have you know information on his academic goals as you know um adaptive skill goals all that and um i just remember like they were all looking at me like okay well so who's gonna take over when you're on your leave when you're on maternity leave and i'm looking at them like i don't know like i'm a i'm like nine months pregnant i'm sitting at this table with like like it was about it was about 10 people um you know i was one of the one of two people who had only ever met this child and i had like you know food stains on my shirt because i'm driving and eating at the same time and i'm like you're asking the pregnant lady who's like can't get her life together um so anyway um i i'd say that my experience was really defined by um just how much of that shifting i had to constantly do um and it was it was i identify with what ingrid said like there were definitely points in the year i was like this is not reasonable like i would come back to the like the home office to do my notes and all that um and then i'd get there at like three four in the afternoon and that just wasn't enough time to help me catch up from having seen you know somewhere in the ballpark of like eight to ten kids um in one day so yeah i i learned a lot from that experience and about juggling and about what what i do want to juggle what i don't want to juggle um but um yeah i i just think that there's so much to learn about like from different placements and different jobs um and what works and what doesn't work but i want any sorry go ahead LIZA: i wanted to ask you because you kind of just skimmed over the fact that you were pregnant and all of us are moms here so i mean were you sick at all did you have to ever like take a break to throw up i mean that's a that's a huge factor in your cf DESI: yeah so actually i was really fortunate um i had the so one of the reasons i um i was one of these people who didn't really know that they were pregnant until kind of an embarrassing amount of time had passed um

it's because much is an embarrassing one how long i didn't know oh i think i was i was at least six or seven weeks LIZA & INGRID: oh that's yeah it's not that bad no DESI: no okay no it wasn't like oh surprise you're pregnant no um but it was it was a few weeks in and it's because i got nauseous at night um and i that's when i had like i had like evening sickness after dinner um you know i never really had any of those like bad symptoms um so during the day i was fine i you know knock on wood it was that was fine i mean it was more so like and i felt good like i felt like once i got into my second trimester and i wasn't so tired like it helped so much because my kids were always on the go like i i was that you know speech therapist like chasing after kids um you know and so um you know i i i think that like being pregnant wasn't that big of an obstacle um like in terms of like doing my job but there were other hazards like so living in maine for example um i definitely fell a few times on the ice uh while pregnant and you know i it just i had to like carry sand around with me to lay down on the ice or put on my actual like snow ice cleat type things i still don't even know what they're called and i've lived here for four years um so anyway i i got smarter about it um and i figured out a few workarounds for that but no um that's why i kind of glossed over it i had an easy pregnancy um and i feel very spoiled to say that out loud because you know you just never know what you're gonna get yeah that's amazing you started your story with like like preschoolers are my jam you know and it it's really like when you're working with the kids that you really want to work with it doesn't matter what's going on with you you're just so happy to be there so yeah i can imagine that you didn't let it be an obstacle and and you had an easy one yes i did and i think some of the people were like what is this pregnant woman do she's like on the floor she's like running around it um it almost made me feel like a bit more like i don't know i think i needed that kind of energy um to keep up with my schedule um so i don't know if it was coming from a place of like burnout like i need to keep moving because if not like i'm toast or um or if it was you know i i want to think that it was more so the positive energy that i got from being with those kids

INGRID: how about your experience liza? LIZA: so mine started off really exciting actually because it it was like the dream job so i got into grad school because of the Deaf community because of my connection with them and i used to be a teacher before becoming a speech therapist so i got this position as a teacher of the Deaf while also being a speech therapist at this at this Deaf school so it was it was like a dream come true when i signed that contract and um i was really excited about it and the first couple days i was like blowing children's noses and vacuuming rooms and it turned out i was kind of like the teacher's aide but was also an slp but was never quite used as a speech therapist so i really had to practice some advocacy skills a - right in my first week and you know you don't want to be labeled labeled as like the difficult one but i was truly concerned about where i was going to get these hours like you need 1300 hours or whatever so i went and i spoke to them and um i moved from like the cleaner to the assistant teacher to the teacher to an slp so really i like moved my way through and uh yeah there were good moments and bad moments so there was all that advocacy that i really had to practice right off the bat but it taught me a lot from from my first year like what i will tolerate and what i won't and what to look for in a job because and i know we'll talk about this in another episode but a lot of times people are always looking for an slp that will fit their environment they're just looking for an slp because so many kids need services and they'll take whoever DESI: it's a it's about a warm body LIZA: yeah the credential i don't like that expression but yes yes yes so there was there was a lot of ableist things happening at my school because the Deaf and hard of hearing community are are not like your neurotypical group of kids and so the tests that we used on them to evaluate them we're not really giving us accurate data on what they can what their capabilities were so i remember being supervised once while um administering an evaluation the CELF and he was a little boy with profound hearing loss and he had cochlear implants and i knew that if he didn't look at me he couldn't hear quote-unquote hear what i was saying because we were working on aural rehabilitation so he really had to like read my lips and and so he looked away at one point during the sentence recall portion so i repeated it because to me he had no chance of repeating it he didn't see or hear what i said and i was really reprimanded for that and the protocol states that you don't repeat and you know like you can't score that and i was like i knew in my heart that none of these standardized scores meant anything for the specific child that was in front of me i needed this data to see if he understood his adjectives nouns i wasn't really looking for how well he could stare at me and hear something on the first shot so it was the start of a little spark of like hmm is there a little bit of ableism happening in here so i am grateful for those experiences because i didn't have a term for what i was feeling i just knew it felt a bit icky and i didn't know how to fix it some things are easier to fix than others like i can't be vacuuming every day and not seeing any children for speech therapy and call myself a speech therapist but other things are a little more subtle like is this the right test to be using and am i scoring this accurately for a child that doesn't really have a chance with some of these subtests INGRID: yeah the normative population is not children who are Deaf or hard of hearing so the scores would have been invalid anyway LIZA: absolutely not and sometimes like their their hearing aids would start blinking so you know it's time to change their battery and who am i to say it is against standardized protocol to stop in the middle of a test to go and change a battery like of course now i would think with your critical thinking skills you would say well this child is not ready or it's the same as if a child needed to go to the bathroom if a child needed a cup of water like you can always take a break whenever in the middle of anything and it will be fine when they come back right yeah DESI: i think that's yeah something else i learned in like in that time after graduating was really about like you know what do you do when you don't have a student who perfectly fits the profile you know for that instrument that you're using and i i definitely had that because again my um my employer at the time was really known for aac um and so we definitely got a lot of referrals for children who were non-speaking and you know you're a cf like you know i had some aac experience in grad school um through some clients but at that moment in time right like you can follow the protocol to standardization but then you score it and you reflect back on what you did and you don't have any actual information to draft goals right so it turned into using some other tools using some dynamic assessment doing some therapeutic probes and including that in my report and i it just made me so much of a better clinician but unfortunately i got there by myself you know um i i wish it would have been kind of more baked into to that process and i think that yeah like you've exactly hit the nail on the head like it's stemming from a place of ableism like the standard is verbal the standard is that you don't have to have a repetition but it's not meant for a lot of the kids that we see you know LIZA: the standard is hearing in my situation was the very thing that they could not do right and i was like what are we doing? DESI: well and that and being able to like have that discriminate you know like to be able to discriminate okay this isn't a hearing thing well you're not able to discriminate that in that testing scenario which is so such a dangerous thing like you know you're no longer i mean it's the same um i know that like uh catherine crawley for example she um does the leaders project out of columbia university she said the same thing like that specific subtest of the CELF the recall the recalling sentences subtest is really a standard american english test right like that's all it's testing can you spit back the exact same syntax and morphology to me um you know and and vocabulary too is a a big role too and INGRID: My kids have the hardest time with the one where you get to the curfew DESI: the curfew? LIZA: yeah that's a super long one right INGRID: yeah the older kids-

my kids who are bilingual and a lot of them are mexican-american they have no idea what that is LIZA: oh right i see you mean the term itself INGRID: yeah term itself they're like what is that? LIZA: i think of the understanding spoken paragraphs subtest where if i could sign it to my to my Deaf kids they could probably respond to all the questions in sign language and to me that would be perfectly acceptable but yeah the the other thing is and we were discussing this offside about how easy standardized tests are they're so easy to administer you just read a bunch of cues and most of the time it's what's this what's this what's that you know if you're doing the goldman-fristoe or whatever but it's also easy to give a bunch of zeros and categorize a child as severe across the board it is easy to do that but it is not easy to draw appropriate goals for that child because then everything becomes the goal because they're apparently severe in everything but then when you speak to them in their most comfortable language which is either sign language or their home language then you see that they're absolutely not severe in every area maybe in no area and so yeah i was like we just need to be better and when i i'm done with the cf i'm going to find a different position where i will be heard more i think it took a couple years before we got there but but here we are now so i know what we're going to ask you how long did you stay there i stayed there for the year and i was i was looking for another job like the second my cf papers were signed and and i loved those kids and i loved that school and to be honest if i didn't have so many student loans and needed to be a speech therapist paid as a speech therapist i could have stayed there i could have stayed on as a teacher and that would have been fine but i was also planning my wedding just like you ingrid that whole year so you know we had student loans before we had the wedding and we wanted to buy a place to live and so um yeah i'm just being honest with that like financially speaking i needed to get a job where i was doing the thing that i studied and paid for that because i know bosses can get a little finicky when it's like well you're actually functioning as a teacher or you're actually functioning as a teacher's aide so we're going to pay you this much and you're kind of stuck if it's your cf like you don't want to rock the boat at all you need your hours you need those signatures so i just let it all go but all those icky feelings i had i kept them with me because those were real valid questions i had to ask myself what kind of therapist are you going to be i'm glad you brought that up because i was going to ask that did you negotiate your salary as a cf either one of you i didn't know that was an option i only learned about those things later i did and i was honestly making peanuts well i still mada peanuts um but i i in my mind because i was a teacher prior to becoming an slp um i needed i wanted my salary um for my cf to match at least what i was making at my previous job before going down this road yes as a teacher and it did match but um but i and it's just something that you said um lisa kind of brought it back to me like i i still didn't have the right balance you know i still found myself doing paperwork all the time i still found myself you know trying to figure out so many things on my own i'm on my own time like right like okay i have a test that's not giving me any information like what you know i needed to find other resources for doing it better by those students and so you know when you start carving out time to do this and to do that like it's what you're supposed to be doing but if it's not built into your work day it's just a recipe for burnout um and so for me um you know i the the driving component to my job plus the fact that i had a caseload that had such high needs like i i really needed to be working on visuals all the time um it was just like a perfect storm for me to not not be able to keep up um and it just it's hard because even if i did the the kind of crummy thing is that i did negotiate um i did get um an additional you know amount i can't remember a couple maybe at two or three thousand dollars or something like that um because i had previous teaching experience in previous preschool experience um but then i found out that the other my other co-workers who graduated from a more local program they were given a sign-on bonus so it kind of like it kind of i mean i obviously had a better deal in the sense that over time i could get a raise um that was you know it provided a foundation for a raise rather than like a you know some sort of stipend or whatever but um it just it felt um i just didn't it just didn't feel like it was um what i needed at the time um and so yeah since then i've been trying to find this work-life balance and it's tricky um i think that that's what my cf taught me that there are things that you can find or create for yourself that are more balanced um and it's it's really hard to do that that and that really takes time it really takes figuring out like what work opportunities there are in your area but it was so important for me to seek those things especially because my cf year ended in 2019 and then i had my son i was you know i was on maternity leave and then when my son was like 10 months old so i was just getting my feet under me after being a new mom then the pandemic hit so all right yeah LIZA: i'm so impressed desi like with everything but i think it worked in your favor that you were a more mature grad student so you probably had these things in mind to think about because i feel i was always told oh it's very ugly to talk about money and you seem so ungrateful if you come in asking for this and this but i knew what i came in with i had teaching experience and i had a master's and i was able to do like three different jobs that they were looking for so i was taking the place of like three individuals and was paid almost nothing not enough to pay my student loan definitely and maybe if i was paid what i was what i deserved maybe i could have stayed there and been okay but everything happens for a reason so DESI: yeah well and it's it's so hard because like i i make it seem so conversational but like i had conversations with other people like is this a reasonable thing to do you know like i i reached out to my aunt um my aunt is a businesswoman so i think that helps because she's like no no you need to ask i'm like okay but you know and and she was also realistic like listen you're new at this so you can't ask for the moon but um you know i i think the the fact that it was normalized to ask for more um and having been a teacher and you know realizing like i wanted to get off the teacher pay scale um you know like that's that's something that i knew already before yeah yeah and i think that in grid sorry i didn't hear what you said ingrid well that's what we went to grad school for you know well one of the reasons anyway and i think that's the heart oh sorry go ahead well i just remember when i looked at slp as a job it said like not only were slp slp's like one of the happiest people apparently we were like the fastest growing so this was in 20 no 2009 2009 whenever i looked up slp and started applying and it was like fast is growing uh you won't struggle to find a job and then the people are relatively like happy at their jobs and the money that i was expecting to make was like 80 to 100 like you'll make six figures no problem and then having come out during a recession and like i said i we looked both of us in recent grads my husband engineer myself and slp and just like to have to settle for peanuts you know like i said applying in july right before school starts in august i'm really thankful of where we've ended up and i think i was telling desi this the other day like now myself i make more than we made together that first year we graduated wow we're so bad in the economy in general and just we were brand new and people were just like you know this is always like everything was in chaos i don't know if you guys remember 2011.

yeah that was my first year teaching 2011. yeah but i wanted to ask ingrid because i feel like you're just such a good you you have um really good advocacy skills you know that you've honed in on over time and i think maybe part of the reason is no it's don't not you're not in your head um you're nodding your head no it's true i think um because you have been in the same setting you've been with the same district um i know you've over the years have explained you know what your role is what your day should look like or how your week should be divided out i'm wondering if you could share a little bit about how you kind of got yourself out of that thanksgiving hole that you were describing where you were you know working on notes and stuff um you know what what were some central pieces to taking what you experienced in your cf and then shaping it into something or where you are today um i think one is a little unfair because it's becoming a mom and i know i've talked about it before on clubhouse like whenever i became a mom and i realized how much work was taking away from my time at home and it wasn't until she needed me my daughter needed me to be whole then i valued my own time so don't be like me don't wait until another human is depending on you to be alive to need to value your own time to value your health to value your mental health to value your hobbies your happiness because i definitely was really unhappy that first year that i was a mom that was even harder for me than um being a cf so i think that was one way and then another was having that bilingual mentor she helped me so that year that i ended my cf and she um was going to be gone for the summer and i was going to be doing summer testing and summer school and she's like do not let them pay you less your evals take longer this is how much they pay me for an eval she showed me

DESI: how important INGRID: yes so important to be transparent and talk about money and she showed me this is how much they pay me don't let them pay you less i'm off on vacation

she she showed me the ropes and that was so LIZA: that was so powerful you shared that story with me and i will never go back to having not heard that story when i hire slps i show them this is how much i will make from the client that you're seeing this is how much i'm giving you this is the profit margin that will go into your pd and your whatever you need like this is the transparency of it people just want to make money for the sake of making money and just be that middle person to just collect the profits but if you if you give back and you yeah i just love what your mentor did i did want to talk about the the disorganization of my fellowship is what helped me become a very fast notetaker soap writer everything because because i was mostly a teacher and then randomly three four months in my supervisor would come in and be like where are the treatment plans where are the progress reports i'd have to hurry up and write a bunch i learned to do those very very quickly and i realized that they take so long to do because i take the time to do them if you're given three months to do something or three minutes you'll be able to do it so really i didn't know back in september i was supposed to do all that and then december when she said they're due next week they all got done and i was like oh this could be written pretty fast i don't have to overthink it i don't have to make this so fluffy and so this and that so that there yeah there were so many invaluable lessons i learned at that INGRID: i'd rather learn from being like lead still i know i wouldn't i wouldn't take your experience liza i'm sorry LIZA: you know yeah we can ask the question hey would you do it over ingrid i wouldn't leave us that's not do lisa's experience over but to your point i was thinking about like saying yes and all the things that get thrown at us um that year too i got thrown into the supply closet with all our testing materials and to figure out what needed to be ordered for the next year and i had to learn real quick every assessment that was available to me and like trying to figure out how to guesstimate for next year how many protocols we would need like so i got really good at using all those inventories on asha and on you know pro ed and all those companies that make assessments to figure out like what's coming next because if something's going to be discontinued what's the point of ordering so you know where there are other slp so like maybe test here and there once a month i was testing every week and i was doing inventory and i was talking to these companies about when their next test was coming so you need to ask a question about assessment i know it because i was thrown into it i'm like how do i even decide for the whole district what we're gonna order and what's here LIZA: how is that on you as a first year? INGRID: because i was the one using the stuff right wow you know i mean they all order for themselves for their offices for the kids that they tested once a month here and there you know but i was testing the whole district all the bilinguals the preschoolers all the way to high school and i needed english assessments and i needed spanish assessments wow and i was thrown into it and i wanted to do it i wanted to learn because that was the experience i was missing from grad school not having you know too much too many clients who are spanish-speaking but i that was one thing that got through me that i'm like okay i learned from that because now like i know where they come from who makes them and why how long it takes all of that LIZA: okay for anyone who heard our last episode i'm gonna pull an ingrid right now and say that at my cf i had a giant classroom with three round tables i had windows someone else always ordered the evals and because we always used the same like three tests on everybody i never had to worry about any of that stuff but you remember when you were telling us like in my school we never had to write lesson plans

yes INGRID: i had a whole classroom that first year i did and it was awesome because it was an accordion door that led to the conference room so i just opened the accordion to go to my meetings LIZA: oh i'm sorry okay so i thought you were assessing the children in that closet with the evaluations INGRID: No, that's just where all the evals were in the and the basement LIZA: got it okay so you're still winning you're still winning you're still winning INGRID: and i gave all that listen to this whenever i got to my third year we went to a brand new school brand new middle school and i had the best office you guys it was the best it was brand new i even had like wall to wall windows and like a shade that would electronically come up and down DESI: fancy INGRID: I gave all that up for my tiny office that i've been in for the last six years happy as a clam LIZA: no wonder she stayed so long we should probably close this up our kids are waking up from their naps DESI: yes yeah i know but i hear my toddler stomping down there INGRID: Our cf years in conclusion were a crapshoot we survived. DESI: we learned a lot! LIZA: Do we have... do we have a word? Our last word for our CF

INGRID: i don't know what's the word for what i said about my time

self-worth like value your time LIZA: i'm gonna go with advocacy yes DESI: yeah balance right uh finding a balance prioritizing a balance living a balance i mean i i can't say enough about like that how important that is um and i feel now especially after the pandemic like i know that that's a buzz word and people talk about that but um it's just it just strikes me like how much having a balance can like make or break your job as an slp INGRID: a balance that works for you DESI: exactly LIZA: yeah amazing thank you guys thank you

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