Graduate School – Say It Any Way

On Starting Graduate School: Lessons from Willy Wonka and Inigo Montoya

I reflected on two movies I watched with my children over the summer as I prepared for Graduate Orientation this year. I realized that these movies actually framed, from my perspective, a preparation for the mindset required for excelling in graduate school. Over the past several years I have been trying to encourage graduate students to shift their perspective from the kinds of strategies that helped them to be successful in their undergraduate program, to what would allow them to be successful in graduate school. This year I tried the movie approach. Here is what I thought.

The two movies I drew from are Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the 1971 version with Gene Wilder) and The Princess Bride. I selected a quote from each movie to focus on.

QUOTE 1:

Willy Wonka: And Charlie, don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he’d ever wished for.

Charlie: What happened?

Willy Wonka: He lived happily ever after.

In starting graduate school particularly after confirming acceptance into a program, there could be this sentiment. All the hard work has paid off. You have wanted something for so long and have worked so intensely to make it happen. There has to be a moment or even longer to savor that feeling. To a certain extent this part is true. You should be congratulated for an incredible job well done. On the other hand, that isn’t all there is. I don’t know where the point is where one lives happily ever after (or even if in terms of personal development that is something to reach), but I will say that graduate school is not the point of happily ever after. I believe the situation is much more like in quote 2

QUOTE 2:

Inigo Montoya: Is very strange. I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.

Westley: Have you ever considered piracy? You’d make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.

My recommendation to students is to live by this second quote in graduate school. There are several reasons why this is apt. First, there is a recognition that you have been working toward a single goal for a very long time. You have prepared in a certain way and it has been successful for you. Much like Inigo you worked and worked and finally attained your goal. There is the excitement Willy Wonka noted, but what about the plan?

Inigo cannot continue to apply his revenge strategies for the rest of his life. Similarly, you cannot continue to apply your “getting into graduate school strategies” in graduate school. This means if you have worked with a singular goal get the highest possible grades every course and have taken on multiple extra curricular activities to gain new experiences and distinguish yourself among a large field of applicants or just to improve yourself and learn more about the field you may need to consider a change. Like Inigo you need to consider “piracy” because you really will make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts. Ok. Maybe you don’t want to sail the high seas, get scurvy, and pursue treasure. However, the Dread Pirate Roberts was a singular presence. He was also the captain. Maybe consider what it means to be a pirate captain. I did a search for qualities of a good pirate captain and came across this site:

http://www.piratesahoy.net/wiki/pirate-captain-qualities/

I am so grateful for the qualities that were offered there. Thank you Captain Python!

The key factors listed were: Discipline; Being Human; Taking Risks; Tactician/Decision Maker; Courage and setting an Example; and Cooperating with Your Officers.

Discipline: OK, you don’t need to make people walk the plank, but what about self-discipline? This is an incredibly important quality for your success in graduate school. Sure you need to “buckle down” and work hard. I’m not talking about that kind of discipline. For a pirate captain you need to balance between too much discipline where you risk a mutiny and too little discipline where you aren’t respected or listened to. If you are too rigid in dealing with your self and your instructors and supervisors, you will not be successful. Mutiny on this scale is not something to be toyed with. Similarly, if you don’t demonstrate enough discipline you won’t be successful. You won’t be taken seriously and others may question your commitment. Program directors definitely don’t want to think that of their large pool of applicants, they filled a spot with someone who doesn’t seem to want to be there.

Being Human: In this case, it is about knowing your limits. The pirate captain weighs input from other experts. The captain who always thinking he/she knows it all can’t possibly know it all. If your goal in graduate school is to know it all, you won’t be successful. A mark of wisdom is recognizing your limits, but knowing that you can find answers if you seek them out.

Taking Risks: Sometimes I meet undergraduate students who don’t want to take risks in courses because they fear for their GPA or they don’t want to try something very new and different because it could take the focus away from their program. This is not a strategy for graduate school. I find it is embracing diversity and other areas of knowledge that fosters creative and the kind of integration that you need to do in clinical situations.

Tactician/Decision Maker: Making good decisions has to do with managing resources and understanding the pros and cons associated with different courses of action. In graduate school there are fewer right/wrong answers and more answers that carry good and not so good consequences. A tactician weighs those things quickly and anticipates consequences. Sometimes you even end up tactically needing to make a decision that costs in in the short term, but pays off in the long run. If you focus only on points in a class, but don’t actually grasp larger concepts, you haven’t won.

Courage and Setting and Example: Here is an easy carryover example. In my undergraduate classes if I offer an open ended question to the class, “Who knows the difference between synthesized and digitized speech?” I might get downward stares from a room with the occasional hand up. The idea again is being conservative. There isn’t a big gain in answering even if you are right, but there is a perceived loss if you answer and get it wrong. In graduate school be courageous. Raise your hand. Ask questions. Put your ideas out there.

Cooperating with your Officers: There is a zero sum game mentality that can happen in undergraduate programs. If there are only a finite set of spots to get into graduate school then if someone else succeeds, you lose. I’m not sure that is 100% accurate, but there certainly is a hefty amount of competitiveness that gets spread in programs. You may not be sincerely happy for someone else’s success and instead focus on what their success means for your standing. In graduate school, it is so critical to be strong with your classmates. You aren’t competing against each other anymore. You are all on the same ship and you sail or sink together.

In my experience the qualities above are in so many of the graduate students I interact with on a daily basis but they tend to be manifested differentially. Some students embrace and cultivate these qualities and I believe they are the ones who become truly outstanding clinicians. There are several I would proudly bestow the title of Pirate Captain on. Are you ready to be a pirate captain? You’d make a wonderful one!

Incidentally, the @ouCSD Staff gave me this the next day…

AAC: An Interactive Clinical Casebook

Thanks to Plural Publishing for helping me and Aimee Dietz produce AAC: An Interactive Clinical Casebook for speech-language pathology students and professionals.

Aimee and I set the stage for the resource by considering what it takes to move from being a beginning to an expert clinician.

This was a project 4 years in the making. We are so grateful to the incredible contributing authors for their work and to the people and families willing to share their stories so that students and professionals can learn and grow as a result.

Choosing a minor to go with CSD #slp2b

My advisees frequently ask me, “What should I minor in?” or “I heard having a minor is a good thing, which minor should I choose?”

I can think of many good reasons to add a minor. Maybe you took a course in an area and decided you would like to learn more. As you take more classes you find that it is of interest to you. If it arises out of your interest, I’ve never known someone to be disappointed. Minors can also be the logical result of a double major that just isn’t feasible for your own personal situation. Ultimately with a double major you frequently need to choose a primary direction anyway, so choosing a major/minor split might be a good way to start figuring it out. In other cases individuals choose minors to complement their major. I think this is fine, but I still think there has to be some kind of personal motivation there. There still needs to be interest, and I would even argue some passion for the topic. A minor still requires a prescribed program of study so following through with all the requirements still takes a commitment on the students’ part. Imagine majoring in something you weren’t particularly interested in. It would be much more difficult to complete. Majors that complement CSD logically can include things like linguistics, communication studies, and psychology, but they could also include physics, nutrition, or another health related field that could add depth or breadth to a CSD major. Just be sure these areas are truly of interest. Because…

There is a reason NOT to minor.

If you are minoring in something not out of your own interest, but out of a desire to distinguish yourself for graduate admissions, this is not a reason to minor in something. As someone who has been on graduate admissions committees and as someone who is now a program director, I look for students who passionately pursue their own interests. Pursuing something just to distinguish yourself to me is more like the student telling me what they think I want to hear. Students who are always looking for “the right answer” may struggle with clinical situations where there isn’t necessarily one single right answer. Whether I agree or not, I want to know what students are interested in. My experience when students minor in something that they aren’t passionate about is that they generally don’t do as well as when they take classes in areas they really like. Consequently they lower their GPA and their distinctiveness rather than increasing it. They then experienced frustration with both the content and their grades. This is a lose-lose situation.

As someone who majored in voice performance, I can tell you that your interests and your passion (as well as your demonstrated ability to perform in CSD classes) is what distinguishes you. Minors are an opportunity to pursue something of high interest to you. Ultimately getting the minor doesn’t even need to be your end goal if you have taken courses of interest. I was three credits short of minoring in Italian. It never held me back that I didn’t complete it (to my knowledge) and I never regretted not finishing the minor because I took courses of high interest, pursued study abroad experiences, but then ultimately decided to study some other languages as well.

I am not saying, don’t minor. I am saying let your minor grow out of your interests whether it is passion for a topic or a desire to broaden your perspective on a topic within CSD (but that is still interest related). Please, please, please, don’t minor in something because you think I want you to. I want to know what you want.

The Ultimate Flip: Intervention First in Teaching SLPs

There has been a lot of discussion of the “flipped classroom.” It generally refers to classroom time being focused on hands on activities while lectures and reading assignments are completed outside the classroom. There is another flip to consider in SLP. The flip of assessment and intervention coverage in the classroom. #slpeeps #slp2b

Assessment drives intervention. I know this. I believe this. It is a critical foundation for AAC practice. You have to understand a person’s needs and skills so that you can appropriately match the technology to those needs and skills. Does your teaching sequence have to match that though? What I intend to explore is the idea that it doesn’t.

Let me lay out several reasons why I’m considering this change:
1. Students don’t get enough time on intervention. There is so much to say about assessment. Good assessments are critical. But if you spend too much time talking about assessment, you may run out of time in the semester to talk about intervention.
I keep hearing from students that they know a lot of how to assess, but don’t feel at all confident when it comes to intervention. This poses a serious problem for them.
2. Expert AAC clinicians are not linear thinkers.
3. Students needs to not be linear thinkers and they are already set up for way too much of it.
4. Students are already doing clinical work in intervention. Frequently they are on either a diagnostic rotation or an intervention one, but there frequently isn’t continuity there for many reasons.
5. Students who transition to work in the school system inherit a caseload. Going back and doing assessment with everyone there would require reengagement of the IEP process, which takes an extended period of time and STILL requires that intervention be done in the meantime.

So how will I accomplish this? I plan to present a case per week where there are intervention goals and activities already illustrated. Students have access to the assessment information as well, but the focus will be on the goals, research related to the intervention technique(s) and programming/ideas for how to implement a goal in a given clinical session or in a given setting. At least one App (probably more) will be discussed with each case. At the end of the course after the students have had some experience seeing intervention, we will discuss assessment. We’ll look at tests/checklists/profiles/informal methods with regard to the cases we have already discussed. They will still be getting all the information.

I am writing this so that I commit to doing this. I have frequently promised to do more related to intervention in my class. Now I am publicly committing to it. Look for future blog posts to see how it turns out or feel free to comment 🙂

For #slp2b: Faculty perspective on Grad School Application Process

This post originated in a reply to a entry on Katie Millican’s truly excellent blog. http://slpecho.wordpress.com/

I thought I would also post it here, but I give credit to Katie for inspiring this. The original post was a set of good questions about why the Graduate School Application Process can’t be more streamlined.

Original post:

I can greatly appreciate the added stress that tracking multiple requirements creates in this [the graduate school application] process. As Elizabeth noted, CSDCAS is an effort to help reduce this stress [the fact that every school has different requirements for what to fill out, where and how] nationwide. Individual programs elect to participate and a list of participating institutions can be found by checking the CSDCAS website.
It is my firm belief that programs are not deliberately trying to make the process difficult. One of the challenges has to do with what individual universities will allow. CSDCAS definitely helps but there can still be differences program to program even with CSDCAS. A discussion of this delves a little into the depths of university-organized structures so I’ll try to be brief. A university generally has different colleges within it. The colleges then have schools/departments/units. That means you could have a University with a College of Health Professions (generic choice of name) and then a Department of CSD. You might also have a university that tracks graduate students separately through what is known as a Graduate College in addition to the structures above. OK. So why is this important? It is important because different entities within the university have negotiated their own ways of tracking students for administrative and financial purposes (graduate assistantships for example). Each of them works to a certain extent autonomously, but must still relate to the others in some way now and then. So the way that CSD tracks students may differ slightly from the way that programs own College of Health Professions does as well as the way that University’s Graduate College does. Once different facets of the organization are involved each has their own particular way of doing things. So in addition to a CSD unit’s decision to join CSDCAS, the program may still need to have students be tracked through a different university pathway such as a Graduate College. It is the negotiation of these structures within each university that make things tricky. I do this as part of my job and still say Huh?
What this means for students is that they may or may not need to file multiple forms with the same university or the forms they file for each university may look different. This isn’t meant to defend the practice necessarily, but at least to provide a little perspective. Universities have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of graduate students all of whom need to be tracked by a number of different units across a university. In the same way that having a centralized application process for CSD applicants would be helpful, a single platform for universities to communicate internally would also be good. Unfortunately there are a number of barriers to go into related to that…