Name: Lindsay Burger
Major: Linguistics
Minor (if applicable): Spanish
Hometown: Davison, Michigan
Why did you choose to become an SLP?
I was really intrigued by the medical field. I really wanted to help people. In high school I wanted to be a Pediatrician, but when I shadowed a friend’s mom, I fell in love with Speech language pathology.
MSU does not have this major, so when picking your undergrad and graduate school what did you look for?
The person I shadowed went to MSU l and I knew it was a really good school, so I decided to go there, but I didn’t know they didn’t have speech as a major so I actually started off on the Pre-Med route. Linguistics is quite similar to speech, so I fell into linguistics and I loved doing that because learning about child language acquisition, second language acquisition, and language in general was so exciting.
I picked GW because I really liked their clinic and the different disciplines you could experience in their clinic. I also liked the atmosphere of the small cohort they had at the school, in fact the people from my cohort and I had a zoom call yesterday. They have been so resourceful to go to as well.
When it comes to working with children what is the hardest part? Most rewarding?
The hardest thing can sometimes be building the relationship before jumping into therapy because otherwise therapy can be very hard to complete with them. Seeing a child become aware they reached a goal or made progress is extremely rewarding. I also love when they enjoy therapy.
Online therapy can be tricky, so do you have any advice for SLPs that transition into the workforce who will have to start this?
There is a lot you need to practice before, like really understanding the technology you have to use. While you can use all of your normal therapy tools, you do have to be more innovative and creative with making them work. For me it was finding resources and collaborating with the SLP community to see how they are doing it.
What kinds of tools do you use to assist you?
For me I definitely use youtube, music, movement breaks, and reward charts. Sometimes I use little toys like people and furniture, especially for teaching prepositions. For online I use pink cat games, which lets the kids do fun games while they work like find the dinosaur, as well as a lot of my normal pdfs and worksheets.
Is there a way for future SLPs to connect with you?
Definitely! They can reach out to me at my personal email lindsayburger16@gmail.com.