This is the time of year when final year MSc student speech and language therapists are busily writing up their project dissertations and first year MSc student speech and language therapists are just getting started. And always a time of year when we start encouraging the new project students to get onto twitter and write a blog.
New students spend time midway through their first year selecting which projects they want to participate in. For some the decision is logical and many projects speak to their underlying interests and experiences. In this really engaging and personal account, one of my current students Nadia describes her journey so far.
Joining the BCPPA project was a complete no-brainer for me since I’ve been around people with dementia from a young age and devoted a significant amount of time to researching aphasia during my undergraduate. For Anna’s blog, I’ve decided to write up the very abridged version of events that led to me joining the BCPPA team!
An early memory of mine is going to visit my great-grandmother at her nursing home in North Carolina when I was about 5-years-old. She was in the later stages of dementia and had, at this point, forgotten most of her English. Her family were Spanish immigrants and had moved to the US to work in the coal mines of West Virginia. I felt a greatly reduced connection with her at this age because our communication consisted of simple English-Spanish translations made through my father. I imagine we still got our main messages across and I’m very glad to have met at least one of my great-grandparents.
Difficulty communicating with my family was a constant in my childhood. I was raised in English, so could easily speak to my American family, but speaking with my Finnish family required good English skills on their part, or use of my mother’s Swedish-English translating skills. Confusingly, my Finnish family belongs to a Swedish speaking minority in Finland that lives along the west coast so we don’t speak much Finnish at all. However, the language barrier never stopped my brother and I from playing with our younger cousins and communicating through various gestures and actions.
Eventually, we moved to Finland to live closer to our Finnish family and so my mother could return to school and start her career. I entered secondary school and learned Swedish while my mother entered university to become a registered nurse and later join the field of palliative care. Our bookshelves began to fill up with titles such as “How We Die” and “The Study of Dying” while my mother’s articles on topics like euthanasia and end-of-life care structure began to appear in the local newspaper, making progressive conditions and death a normal topic in my household.
The year I turned 18, I got a summer job working on a rehabilitation ward in the local health service. The patients included elderly people recovering from surgery as well as individuals with dementia. My role mostly involved cleaning and serving food, but also included time for socializing with the patients. While I couldn’t speak to everyone because of my crude Finnish skills, I did get to experience what conversations could be like with those individuals with dementia that spoke Swedish. I also observed how their conditions affected interactions with their families when they came to visit.
Following this summer of hospital work, I entered into my first year of a Psychology and Language Sciences undergraduate at UCL. I already had an interest in Psychology from my time at school, but wanted to study a joint degree since I thought doing plain psychology would be “too boring” at the time. I chose the UK because, in my opinion, it was “Europe, but in English”.
Modules in psychology and linguistics quickly fell off my radar as I was most interested in the neuroscience of cognition lectures and the modules that focused on communication difficulties, like stuttering and aphasia. My interests pushed me towards a final year research project on language processing in background noise in people with aphasia. I was invited to join my supervisor’s aphasia group therapy sessions at her communication clinic to prepare me for the data collection portion of my project. From the very first group session, I knew this was the client group for me. Every individual’s experience of aphasia was so very different, and I felt that working with adults gave the opportunity for developing deeper connections with clients built on mutual respect. Once my project was finished and submitted, I was awarded the Tavistock Trust for Aphasia Student Special Prize for my research and had thoroughly caught the research bug.
Getting a Speech and Language Therapy qualification seemed like the natural next step for me so I applied for the MSc Speech and Language Sciences at UCL. The summer before I started the MSc was spent interning with the Neurotherapeutics Group at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. My way into this research intern position was through a good relationship formed with my third-year tutor who happened to be a PhD student in the group. Therefore, I fully advocate for speaking up and doing the work in tutorials – good things can come of it! I spent two months transcribing recordings from tDCS research, helping out at focus groups where people with aphasia tried new therapy apps, and assisting in developing aphasic speech recognition technology. Definitely look into them if you are interested in digital therapy apps for your clients with aphasia!
Acquired disorders and working with adults in general are still where my interests lie, even after a year of placements at schools and modules on developmental disorders of speech, language, and communication. Seeing Anna’s project in the booklet was like a revelation for me because I would be able to work with both dementia and aphasia at the same time. It’s a field that I can definitely see myself sticking with in the future and joining the team has been a lovely experience so far.
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