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In addition to the different experiences Speech-Language Pathology (SLP) students gain from treating and evaluating people in the Speech-Language Institute (SLI) of Salus University, Caitlin Panella, MS ‘18, CCC-SLP, believes SLP alumni have another big advantage: They can draw on the knowledge and experience of the program’s chair and director, Robert Serianni, MS, CCC-SLP, FNAP.
“It’s important to touch on things he involved us with in the community,” said Panella. “He lives in Glenside, Pennsylvania, (near the Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, campus) and he knows so many people in the community.”
That community connection proved to be invaluable to Panella in her SLP studies. While at Salus, Serianni had his students go to nearby Moss Rehab for labs and to participate in the hospital’s annual Race for Recovery run, walk and roll; host a table at the Philadelphia Science Festival to educate the public about articulation and swallowing disorders; volunteer at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) convention when it was held in Philadelphia; and after graduating, Panella and her classmates were accepted to present their Capstone Projects at the ASHA convention in Boston.
The combined classroom, actual experience and community involvement enabled Panella to be well-prepared when she stepped out into the professional world.
Panella, who now works in early intervention after school with children ages three to five years and also serves students in kindergarten through 12th grade for ASPIRA Bilingual Cyber Charter School in the Olney section of Philadelphia, said that as an independent contractor, she is in charge of all of her behind-the-scenes organization. Things like scheduling her own services, coordinating with parents and teachers, adjusting treatment times around naps and lunchtime.
“I think that as a student as Salus, it fully prepared me to be confident and self-sufficient in order to be able to hop in and do all of that while being on my own all day long,” she said.
One thing Panella didn’t count on — like everybody else — was how the COVID-19 pandemic would affect her job, forcing SLPs to adjust quickly to teletherapy. “Teletherapy was always part of our discussions in our coursework at Salus, but now after experiencing teletherapy, I can’t wait to go back to in-person learning,” she said.
As a speech therapist working virtually, Panella needs to be more engaging with her young students on the computer to hold their attention for longer periods.
“In person, I always had games to fill the time and keep it engaging. But over the computer, I’ve seen speech therapists who have dressed up in costumes and created their own green screens behind them,” she said.
Once normalcy returns, Panella is also looking forward to taking the expectations off of parents and caregivers, who have had to shoulder a bigger role in the children’s education at home.
“I work with students from a low-income area. We didn’t have a whole course on counseling for nothing. Some of my students’ families have lost their jobs during the shutdown, they have lost loved ones, pets even,” said Panella. “Some people have had to return to work in the middle of the pandemic and they didn’t have a caregiver that was able to get them online for their school services. That’s a lot of expectations for the parents and caregivers.”
Despite the added challenges, Panella said she loves working in early intervention services with children and helping them become more prepared to advance their education.
Before the pandemic hit, she considered herself a “foodie” who enjoyed going out to eat, as well as attending concerts and festivals. But working from her kitchen table during the pandemic has had a bit of a silver lining in that it presented her the opportunity to redo her entire house, with the help of YouTube videos and advice from employees at the big box home improvement stores.
But she wouldn’t trade her Salus experience for anything.
“The SLP program was new when I started, but the University already had a good reputation of offering a full and in-depth experience,” said Panella. “But Salus stood out for me because of its interprofessional collaboration. It uses that interprofessional collaboration to its fullest extent during our course studies.”
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