This roundtable is part of an ongoing podcast series about the Speech-Language Pathology program at Salus University.
Thanks for joining us for our podcast series, talking about speech-language pathology graduate school. Join Robert Serianni, MS, CCC-SLP, FNAP, the chair and program director of the department of Speech-Language Pathology at Salus University as he speaks with a recent alum from the first graduating class of the Speech-Language Pathology program in 2017.
To start us off, our alum introduced herself with a bit of background on when she graduated from Salus and what she's doing now:
Bridget Turnbach:
My name is Bridget, and I graduated from Salus University in 2017. I was, as Bob said, part of the first graduating class. I am currently living in Baltimore, Maryland working at The Therapy Spot; it's a pediatric multidisciplinary clinic. We have an OT department, a PT department, speech, and then we're also combined with Steps, which is our ABA department. Then we also have a contract agency called PDS that contracts out to the schools in the area as well. So I kind of have my hands in a little bit of everything right now.
Bob Serianni:
So that experience you had at Salus where we got to do a little bit of learning with other programs, has that really helped your experience in your current practice?
Bridget Turnbach:
It's been life-changing. I mean, everything I'm able to see with OT, PT, speech, I was able to kind of start out the door and have a really good understanding of what those other areas were and how they kind of functioned in hand with speech, versus some of my colleagues who hadn't worked with those other professions before or hadn't spoken to those other professions before had a lot more of a learning curve with coach rates and things of that nature than I did coming in.
Bob Serianni:
One of the things I'm really interested in exploring is how graduates from our program are working. You've had sort of a wandering path as a speech pathologist since you graduated from Salus. Tell us a little bit about where you started and how you ended up in Baltimore.
Bridget Turnbach:
I had my first job lined up before I graduated from Salus. I had agreed to my first job by March of my last year there. It was a really great and easy process. I started out in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Kind of up and moved my life out after graduation. I was working in Pueblo, Colorado at a multidisciplinary clinic there. Again, it was just speech, OT and PT. There was no ABA there at the time. While I was there, I got a cold call from a travel agency asking if I wanted to take a job in Alaska for three months, and I said, "Excuse me, where?" They said, "Yeah, we have a three month maternity leave coverage in Homer, Alaska. Would you be interested?" And I said, "That's where in Alaska? I know Anchorage. That's not Anchorage." They told me it was a small community on the Kenai Peninsula, about four and a half hours outside of Anchorage. So I jumped on the opportunity and took up travel therapy for a while.
So I started in Alaska. It was my first school-based position after only really being an outpatient, other than in grad school at one of my placements. It was a really easy transition for me. I felt like I had the foundation to kind of jump between the two settings and really pick up where I left off in grad school about two years before that. After Alaska, I decided I wanted to continue to travel and I took a summer job in Delaware and I was able to work with post-secondary students all the way down to kindergarten. I had a kindergarten classroom, second and third grade combined summer classroom, a high school high-needs classroom, and post-secondary, which was again, just a great, incredible experience that I could still grow from.
Then I still wasn't done traveling after Delaware, so I decided to move to Southern Maryland. I was in Charles County school district down there for a year at the middle school and preschool. Again, a very diverse caseload down there. Then I decided to hang up my traveling shoes and maybe create a foundation, which was a nice change of pace and it landed me here at The Therapy Spot in Baltimore, and I've decided that this is going to be a place I stay for a while. So it's been a journey.
Bob Serianni:
Did you have any trouble as you moved across the United States in getting credentialed, demonstrating your professional competencies as a graduate from a newer program like Salus?
Bridget Turnbach:
No, I had no issues at all. My Colorado license came in really easily. Alaska was really easy. Delaware was really easy. Maryland was really easy and I still have all of them. The hardest part of any process was the fingerprinting and that had nothing to do with my education so much as just the state board procedures that were in place. So that's really the only issues I had. No one questioned it. When people ask me what Salus University was and I explained that it was an all health sciences graduate school, people were really impressed by it actually and thought it was a really great opportunity for a clinician to get those experiences.
I mean, my first job out, I knew more about optometry, audiology, some of those other programs that Salus had that I was able to create connections with, that we had kids coming in who just got glasses and I could call up my friends who are a part of the optometry program and be like, "Hey, who should I be sending this person to? An optometrist? An optician? Where am I sending this person?" I was able to have those resources that I may not have had without that interdisciplinary studying that we had at Salus.
Bob Serianni:
Any surprises since graduation? Anything that you thought, "How did they not tell us this?" Or, "God, I'm glad they told us this."
Bridget Turnbach:
I think the biggest surprise is I've gotten a lot more into AAC recently and how long those funding documents are. We hear about it in grad school, but to actually go and have to fill that paperwork out and the process and the length of time it takes for the turnaround was a huge surprise to me. I think the other thing that was surprising is how much of what we learned in grad school just becomes what you do every day. You go to undergrad and you go through four years and you learn so little and so much information, then you go to grad school and have two years of these more specific coursework ideas and frameworks, and they just really become your everyday life, which has been awesome to see.
Bob Serianni:
Our listeners are not only applicants to Salus, but graduate students or pre-graduate students across the continent. I've always asked our participants to really think about what was one piece of advice that you want an undergraduate who's moving into graduate school to think about before they get here or elsewhere?
Bridget Turnbach:
Be ready to dive headfirst into everything. I think that by me, diving into grad school the way I did and really making that be my career for two years, I came out of grad school so ready to go into the field and feel confident in what I was doing. I think by being able to take all the information, all of the resources, I mean, just having a great set of professors. I know when I was at Salus, a lot of our professors we had were still working in the field. I still have contact with a few of them that when things come up, I'm able to go and call them and say, "Hey, I have this kid, this is what I'm following that you gave me in class, but now I've hit the end of what I remember. What was that next step again?"
Being able to have those resources, to be able to continue to grow that practice after those two years, it comes with jumping head into everything and absorbing as much as you can in those two years, when you have those experts in the field there and willing to work with you.
Salus is what really gave me that confidence to start being a great clinician and to grow from there. So it was a great foundation for my career.
