Linking up with Gretchen and Kristen for their monthly linkup: What's New With You?
September was a whirlwind, and not the fast kind. In fact, it was a downright difficult month. Those 30 days dragged on for me, as it probably for much of Florida. Hurricane Irma put our lives on hold for two weeks while we all scrambled, preparing for the worst, and it took a little while to get back into the swing of things. Hurricanes aside, September marked the beginning of quite a few changes and realizations, and I'm so excited to be sharing them with you!
1- As I mentioned last week, we're moving! Our new place is just about 20 minutes away from where we live now, right in the center of south Tampa. It's a smaller apartment in a historic 1920's era building - no pool, no gym, no amenities - so it'll definitely be a change, but I think it'll be so fun to be right in the middle of everything! Since the listing has been taken down, I don't have any photos of our exact unit, but our leasing agent sent over pictures of a very similar apartment, so I thought I'd share a teeeensy sneak preview:
2 - Before going to graduate school, I volunteered in the speech-language pathology department at one of the biggest hospitals in Tampa. Prior to volunteering in their outpatient rehab, I had no idea the kind of work that SLPs did with adults, from cognition and memory to voice and swallowing. Ever since, I knew I wanted to return to the hospital to complete one of my externships. Note: me and everybody else. It's a pretty competitive externship placement, so when I interviewed a couple of weeks ago (on 48 hour notice...), I mentally prepared myself for a "no." As it turns out...I got the position! I'll be completing my first externship at the hospital in the outpatient rehabilitation center beginning in January and I am absolutely thrilled. The SLP I'll be working with has a split schedule, so she sees adult and geriatric patients on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and pediatric patients on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I'm excited to get exposure to both populations! But with that, I should mention...
3 - The big question in SLP graduate school is: "do you want to work with kids or adults?" And for the longest time, my answer has been "I have no idea," because I truly haven't been sure! I love kids, but I'd never had that "calling" in the way so many of my friends and classmates do. Over the last year, I've discovered that I really do enjoy working with them. Having said all that, my aging & cognition class took a trip to a local assisted living facility for Alzheimer's Disease and dementia memory care...and I knew. Or at least I'm most certainly, about 98% positive, that I want my future career in speech-pathology to be mostly centered around the adult and geriatric population. And while that may not mean much to most of you, it's a big step for me to be able to say "hey, that's what I want to do." Does that make sense? It's kind of exciting, and I can't wait to see what's next after graduation.
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