After graduating from Temple University with a degree in Communications Sciences and Disorders in 2014, Brianna Casey, AuD ‘20, wasn’t sure if she wanted to pursue a career in speech-language pathology or audiology. So she decided to take a gap year and find out.
During that time, she had several jobs — as a captionist for a deaf middle school, working at a deaf preschool, and as an audiology assistant. In all those jobs, she was working with people experiencing hearing loss, and that encouraged her to pursue audiology at Salus University’s Osborne College of Audiology (OCA).
“I liked that the school was local and how it had an emphasis on clinical hours. That clinical experience was huge,” said Dr. Casey.
She recalls being at a conference where a panel was talking about job placements after graduation. Because she had been trained at OCA, she was confident she was well-prepared.
“A lot of the people on that panel were from other audiology programs and they were panicked because they didn’t feel like they were prepared,” said Dr. Casey. “I remember thinking the complete opposite. I had really great rotations while I was at Salus, so I was able to see a little bit of everything, which I think is important.”
The one bump in the road was similar to everyone else in that the pandemic happened at the end of her educational journey through OCA. During her fourth-year externship at Cooper University Hospital in Camden, New Jersey, in the spring of 2020, COVID hit and everything went into a holding pattern. She completed her audiology courses online while conducting virtual meetings with her preceptors at Cooper. “It wasn’t the same as being in person, but we made it work,” said Dr. Casey.
She secured a job at a private practice, where she remains today, after graduating in May 2020 — the University’s first virtual graduating class — and started her professional duties under the cloud of COVID as well.
“We were seeing patients curbside when I started my job. No one was vaccinated, so I had one sound booth and I could only see two patients in the booth a day because they had to be spaced out and the booth had to be sanitized,” said Dr. Casey.
While she’s happy at her current job, if she ever did want to make a change, she might pursue a job at a Veterans Administration hospital.
“I love my patients, I love what I do day-to-day and I’d be happy to stay in private practice for a while,” she said. Currently, she works mainly with geriatric patients, but if she ever wanted to switch it up, the VA would be where it was at. "I did a VA placement on one of my rotations and I really enjoyed it,” she said.
When she’s not working, Dr. Casey likes to spend time at the beach. She’s married to Zach Raymond, they have a Bernese/Labrador mix dog named Marley, and the couple is expecting their first child in August 2023.
