Can you relate to this?
Often I ask myself that.
It seems like every single night I wonder where the time went. I don't make excuses like this.
I just might not be.
I was talking to a lady on-line. She was in grad school and I said that I keep applying. I mentioned some difficulties that I had with my undergraduate classes--and my applications.
I took a class at Arizona State where we watched 25 recorded speech therapy sessions and answered generic questions like "Was the clinician dressed professionally."
"The clinician never appeared on-camera."
I received terrible scores. We were supposed to write 3 long sentences, but the question was invalid!
I retook it at Eastern New Mexico and tried to ensure that I learned from my class at ASU, but then the worksheet asked questions like "How did the clinician collect data."
"The clinician never appeared on-camera and never mentioned data collection."
I also received terrible scores and neither allowed me to write a summary.
Grad schools don't care that I have worked in the field for 5 years. They don't want letters of recommendation from my supervisors that have seen me do the job, they want letters from my professors saying that I always came in during office hours.
I never needed to come in during office hours!
That woman in grad school told me that she wasn't interested in me, but she couldn't get to the point. You have to understand, she was grad school material, so she wrote something like "I don't believe in ghosting people. I don't believe that it is the right thing to do. I believe that we shouldn't ghost people. I am not interested in you."
Why did she bring up ghosting unless she wanted to make it clear that she wanted to stop talking to me, but she was a better person than that, so she only informed me that she wanted to ghost me?"
Seriously, why not just say she wasn't interested?
She was grad school material!
As I keep trying to apply to grad school I get stupid questions like "Please write 500 words about which color tastes best."
Apparently if you get interviewed you get questions about which superpower you want.
What if I pick the wrong one?!
I had an application due on Monday for a school that required a 2-3-minute video. I wrote out what I wanted to say and recorded myself talking to the camera over and over.
It took me 60-90 minutes because I kept messing up words bad enough that I felt I needed to start over.
I am a speech therapist and I make articulation errors.
It drives me nuts!
I paid $60 and submitted that application.
Do you know about Second Application?
All of these schools require me applying through a different site, although at least they use the same site, so it is easier to apply to multiple programs.
That one required an essay: "Your client's mom wants you to integrate a particular technique; what do you tell her?"--except the question itself was an entire paragraph, including details that I am not sharing here. It mentioned a kid with a diagnosis about which they taught us in college, but in over 5 years I have worked with zero kids with that.
I found an article with dozens of references that said:
1. It doesn't target the problem kids with that diagnosis have.
2. Zero independent and peer-reviewed studies have proven it is useful.
I wrote that and was about to submit it when I saw that it needed to be a page, with references.
If someone needs to talk to you about your kid and they can explain in a sentence or two, do you want them lecturing you?
I wrote a couple of sentences that might be difficult for many parents to understand, so we are supposed to give them more information than virtually any parent would be able to comprehend?
Had the question been "Would you use X treatment for Y disorder, why or why not?" I could have come up with a couple of paragraphs, but that wasn't the question, and answering the wrong question should count against me.
I don't know what it will take to get into an SLP program, but it looks like I am dating a professor--at a university that doesn't have a Communications Disorders program!