3.2 What does a normal day look like for Devin?
Devin Lukachik and Whitney Chappell
Now that we’ve met Devin, let’s learn about his routine. What does a normal day look like for him?
Transcript: “Within the field of speech and language pathology, uh, currently I work in a hospital, a level 1 trauma center, there’s lots of different settings that SLPs can work in, uh, but in my setting I work with a lot of medically complex cases, people who have lost their ability to speak, uh, to produce voice, to swallow, we also treat swallowing just due to the overlap in anatomy and physiology with the speech mechanism, uh, people that have suffered neurological damage that impedes their ability to produce language at the neurological level, um, either from accidents or from degenerative processes like dementia, and I work with cancers that affect the speech mechanisms as well. So I like to explain to people that I treat things from the neck up.”
Of course, the hospital is just one potential setting for SLPs. Many SLPs do go into schools, where they diagnose and treat developmental speech and language disorders, work on improving literacy, social communication, augmentative and alternative devices, and fluency disorders like stuttering. Others work in outpatient clinics, inpatient rehabilitation, private practices, as consultants, or even in the NICU working with feeding and swallowing disorders in infants. SLPs can specialize in a wide variety of areas, such as articulation, motor speech, voice, swallowing, cognitive communication disorders, stroke or brain injury, and more. They can also specialize in specific disorders like ALS, Parkinson’s Disease, or Cerebral Palsy, to name a few. The incredible variety means that it’s difficult to become bored in this field, as there’s always a new setting or population to switch to if it calls to you. My personal interests include working with head and neck cancer, swallowing, voice, and upper airway disorders, but with head and neck cancer, swallowing, voice, and upper airway disorders, but many people do change their specialties over time. There are many interesting subspecialties as well; for example, a handful of SLPs that treat voice have specialized in gender-affirming voice therapy for transgender individuals. SLPs that are skilled in articulation therapy can even try their hand at accent modification therapy for individuals who want to improve their speech clarity in another language.
