Speech Pathology

Barbara:

Hi, I'm Barbara. I'm head of course for Speech Pathology at CQUniversity. Being a speech pathologist is a really important career because as a speech pathologist you get to work with people on communication.

Most of the time we’re communicating in one way or another whether it’s through your voice or your words. Sometimes it’s through your gestures and hand actions but even just making eye contact and things like that. So if you imagine not being able to do that and how that would impact your relationships it would be pretty detrimental to your life. So I feel you know this career is so important and it you know allows you to really help people and make some meaningful change in, in people’s lives.

I think the parts of the course that our students really enjoy here at the university is probably the clinical parts because that’s where you’re actually doing and so in class we teach you a lot about you know why things are important, what you have to consider when you’re working with clients. But when you get to work on our on-campus clinic or even in some of our community settings like the hospitals or some clinics, what happens is you get to apply that, you get to actually work with kids and work with adults and that’s where it feels rewarding and exciting and where you’re like yep this is, this is for me and I actually made the right choice. And you’ll work under the supervision of a clinical educator who will be really supporting you in that first year in terms of you know what you need to do and what you can say in response and you know before and after each clinic day you’ll talk through you know what clients you’ll get and then at the end you talk through, you know what happened that day and how you could it better or differently.

Suzanne:

So my favourite thing about studying here at CQUniversity is the opportunity to connect with the lecturers one-on-one. We have lots of work integrated experiences as well and we get to meet a lot of industry leaders and people in the field who we may not get to experience or get to have those one-on-one chats with without being at the university.

Barbara:

Our students go off to do wonderful careers in the community and we’re quite proud to say that almost 100% of them have gone into regional or rural areas to work, which I think is really important, that’s why the program was put here and so we’re really serving a need in the community. But we’ve had other students do a number really exciting things so we had one student for instance who started off working in a disability sector was able to really expand her skills and knowledge and then she opened her own private practice. So she was able to apply that and then alongside that at the same time she got involved in working with Speech Pathology Australia and helping them develop their policies and planning around indigenising the speech pathology curriculums across Australia, so she’s playing a really key role in our largest organisation to support Speech Pathology Australia. So you know we’re are all really proud of her and she should be proud of herself but it’s just exciting that someone that came from our small program has done so much for the community, but then also for the broader speech pathology community across the country.