How To Become A Speech Therapist

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From the day I started my internship at the speech therapy practise of my former speech therapist I knew I wanted to become a speech therapist myself. I was only 15, maybe 16, at the time, but I was sure. About two years later, the 30th of September 2015 my journey towards becoming a speech therapist has officially begun. If you’re interested in finding out how it all went and hows it’s going at this very moment, make sure you keep on reading.

Let’s start from the beginning shall we? It all started at introduction camp. I really didn’t want to go there. I only knew one other person there and the camp program was filled with parties and lots of other activities I wasn’t too excited about, but because I was sure that if I wouldn’t go I’d have no friends, I went anyway.

The camp took place at a terrible old building in the woods that had only 2 showers in it and lots of spiders and other creepy insects. My mom and grandpa dropped me and my bike off and left. Even though I tried to hold my head up high, but it was clear just from the look on my face that I didn’t want to be there. Hell, I’d rather be anywhere else than there at that moment.

As I walked into the main room I started to feel a little scared. What if the girl I knew wasn’t there yet? Where should I sit then? I walked into the room, looked around and obviously couldn’t find the girl I knew. I had to decide quickly where I was going to sit. I looked around the room again but quickly found out that there was no perfect place to sit, so I randomly decided to sit at a random table. I said hi to the girls sitting there. Some said hi back and some just looked at me with a slightly judging look.

After sitting there for a while, desperately texting my best friend,  I finally found the girl I knew. I decided to sit next to her and we started talking. I was very relieved at this point, but what I didn’t know was that that feeling wasn’t going to last long. After a while the hosts started the camp off with a little talk. They ended their speech with telling us we had to sit with the people who received a letter in the same font as you did. Those people ended up being my group members for the rest of that week.

In order to keep this nice and semi-short I’m not going to go into too much detail about the rest of this camp (also because it might be a little insulting to some people who were there) but in short: I had a terrible experience there. I hated every single part of this camp and I ended up going home early because I just couldn’t take it anymore.

Even though I didn’t enjoy that camp at all I did meet some really nice people there which ended up becoming my friends.

That was it for the first post of the “How to become a speech therapist” series. These stories are all based on my experiences on the road to become a speech therapist. I hope you enjoyed reading it and let me know if you’re interested in more!

XOXO, Nicole.