As a senior in high school, choosing your college is one of the biggest and hardest decisions. Each college has its own positives and negatives and many things can impact your decision. One of the most important benefits to Marywood University was the five-year program for speech and language pathology. Many people do not realize how competitive graduate school is for speech and language pathology, and having the ability to go to one school for 5 straight years makes it so much easier. You don’t have to worry about the GRE’s and the competitiveness of getting accepted into a graduate program.
Coming in as a freshman, it is a little overwhelming. You are in a new school, away from home, and you don’t really know anyone. Throughout the program, all your major classes are with your cohort. Your cohort is the group of people that you move through the program with. You start taking classes with these people when you are a freshmen and continue throughout undergraduate and graduate classes. It is comforting to have a group of people to talk to who are going through similar experiences to you. Your cohort becomes your family. Throughout the five years you get to know everyone very well. All of you are in this together and everyone wants one another to succeed.
As you go throughout the program, there are various group projects and class discussions to get to know all of them. As you get to the graduate phase, you begin to call these people family (because you know them so well and you’re spending all your time with them). It’s nice to not have a “fresh start” to try and find a new school for graduate school; you’re able to go through the program with the same people and learn and grow with them.
At Marywood, the professors treat you like family. All of them are willing to help you with whatever you need. Luckily, our speech classes start during our freshman year. We are able to get a taste of our major right when we start college!