Speech Language Pathology is a great career for any linguistics major! SLPs work with a variety of language disorders, including children with autism and adults who have suffered strokes. SLPs are in high-demand across the nation, so there's job security. SLPs also generally have relatively high salaries. The national average salary for SLPs is over $65k! Unfortunately, the UCSB Speech & Hearing Sciences department became defunct as of Spring 2014. Not having a degree in SLP won't hurt your application to an SLP graduate program, however, if you take certain related courses and display your interest in the career by volunteering to work at schools or hospitals. If you're considering graduate school in Speech-Language Pathology, try to get as many prerequisite courses as you can while you're at UCSB! These include basic general eds like biology, anatomy, physics, psychology, and statistics, as well as neurophysiology, language development, phonetics, phonology, language disorders, and several others. You can take many of these online or at community colleges, or as part of a 3-year SLP Master's program (in which your first year is spent fulfilling undergraduate-level prereqs). The exact prereqs required for graduate admission will vary from school to school, so you should check with the school you want to go to about prereqs. At LingClub, we brainstormed what some good SLP prereq classes might be at UCSB, and came up with this list of suggested coursework. Taking all of these classes is not required before applying for a graduate degree in SLP, but in general these courses would be good prep for a career in SLP. LING 106 – Phonetics LING 107 – Phonology LING 127 – Psychology of Language LING 137 – Language Acquisition PSYCH 1 – Intro to Psychology PSYCH 3 – Biopsychology PSYCH 5 – Intro to Statistics PSYCH 105 – Developmental Psychology PSYCH 110 – Auditory Perception PSYCH 123 – Cognitive Neuroscience PSYCH 142 – Cognitive Development PSY 169L – Laboratory in Neuroanatomy EDU 190 – Autism MCDB 25 – Human Anatomy PHYS 10 – Concepts of Physics Other coursework in sociolinguistics, such as LING136: African American Language and Culture, can help prepare you for the diverse working environments you might encounter in public schools and hospitals. Also consider taking courses in American Sign Language at Santa Barbara City College or at the UCSB Rec Cen if you plan to work with the Deaf community. |