How To Become A Speech Therapist #3

In the past I’ve written about two very memorable experiences on my road to becoming a speech therapist. Both of them took place before I actually started school. Today I’m going to tell you something that happened during my time in school: the story of how I failed my exam. If you’re interested in finding out what happened, make sure you keep on reading!

It was the second semester of school. This semester we had to learn a lot about hearing and voice. I did like the voice part but the hearing part just wasn’t my jam. Even though I didn’t really like hearing, I was pretty good at it if I can say so myself. I understood the theory really well and the practical parts went greag too. Untill the exam..

For the exam we had to do a hearing test, aswer some questions and come up with a possible diagnosis. I wasn’t nervous at all, which pretty unusual since I’m really bad at performing under pressure so things like this usually go wrong.

I went in and did my thing. There were two types of hearing test and you had to do one of them. Which one was upto the teacher. I got the part I wanted so I was even more relaxed than I was before and started with the test.

I walked up to the test person, told her I was going to do the test and told her what she had to do. She sat down in the little room and I put the headphones on her head. Red was for the right ear and blue for left. Because I’ve always struggled with left and right I wasn’t too sure if I did it right and I ended up putting it on the other way around.

When that was done I did the test, answered all of the questions correctly and came up with a proper diagnosis. I was quite confident about what I just did there so I felt happy and relieved that it was done.

But then it happened. The teacher told me I made it difficult for her to decide whether I passed or not. That because I actually put the headphones the wrong way around. End of the story is that I didn’t pass.

Because I’m quite a perfectionist when it comes to school the bad news hit me hard. I was pretty devastated to be honest. When I saw my friend who was waiting for me I broke into tears and told her what happened.

On a more positive note: I did rock the voice part of the exam because I couldn’t care less at that moment. I thought you had to redo that too if you failed the hearing part.

Even though this wasn’t my favourite experience and I wouldn’t have minded it if it didn’t happen, I did learn a lot from this experience. I learned that it’s no big deal if one little thing goes wrong. It’s not the end of the world if you have to redo a test. Just calm down and move on!

For those of you who are wondering how it went the second time around: I was very nervous but I rocked it and ended up getting a 9!

And that was it for today’s How To Become A Speech Therapist. I hope you enjoyed reading it and let me know if you’ve ever experienced something similar!

XOXO, Nicole