SLPA for HCE a good idea? Helpp!

[Vhuman_]

Hi everyone,

I'm a soon to be senior this fall at CSUN majoring in communication disorders with an emphasis in speech pathology. I honestly picked this major because it seemed to have good career prospects and a decent salary. I certainly find some of the material in the major interesting but felt a lot more eager to learn in anatomy class than some of my core classes like phonetics, language disorders. I looked into the PA career and now am very interested in pursuing this after I graduate May 2018. Nowww i'm trying to figure out how to make myself a good candidate for PA school. I will be volunteering at a hospital soon, plan on joining a pre-pa club at my school this fall but I'm really having trouble narrowing down what I should do for HCE hours and I need your help/opinions! My questions are 1) do you think my undergrad major would be a positive/negative when applying for a PA program? 2) would getting a SLPA-speech language pathologist assistant certification postbachelors...be a good choice to fulfill HCE hours? Do you think it would reflect a lack of interest in the PA field or even be accepted for HCE? (P.s ->The certification is about $5000, and the only reason I am considering it is because it pays a lot more than an emt/scribe/cna positions and I have loan payments lined up after I graduate.) ???? The downfall is that although many slps are employeed in a hospital setting, most of the SLP Assistant jobs are in schools. The children would be considered patients...but I'm not sure if it's a good idea for HCE. Should I forget about it and go for emt/scribe or get the certification and make some money during my gap year? Sorry about the long post. Any advice would be greatly appreciated(:

[laferri2]

One thing to watch out for with SLPA is that there are not many jobs for it, and you might end up having to work in school-based which likely won't count as HCE. I have been a practicing SLP for 8 years and have never met an SLPA or seen a job posting for one. You might even have a hard time getting some schools to accept SLPA hours since most facilities won't let SLPAs handle dysphagia management. I would recommend looking into a certification that might assure you more hours in a medical setting. Also remember that most of the undergrad training is pediatric-based, and once you get into grad school you start dealing with medical speech pathology, which is far more interesting. I didn't like pediatric SLP but medical SLP is fun.