March 1, 2024 | Erin Bluvas, bluvase@sc.edu
Brandi Daves had been working as a long-term substitute at her children’s elementary school when she began thinking about a career change. After seeing the positive impact of speech therapy on children in this environment, she was inspired to return to school to become a speech-language pathologist.
The South Carolina native had a background in biology from her time at the College of Charleston, and she began taking the prerequisite classes needed to apply to master’s programs. When Daves' family moved to Lexington in 2021, she knew the timing was right.
Daves enrolled with the Arnold School’s Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders as a student in the M.S. in Speech-Language Pathology – Residential program. Choosing the Auditory Verbal Therapy track, she’s maintained a 4.0 across her coursework.
“My experience at USC has been somewhat unique in that I am older than the typical residential student in my program,” Daves says of spending several years working and raising a family. “While it was often challenging to juggle all my responsibilities, I have always had the support of my family, COMD faculty, clinical supervisors and my cohort. My cohort has gotten very close over the past 18 months, and I am proud to be a part of such an amazing group of soon-to-be-SLPs.”
During her program, she gained practical experience at the department’s Montgomery Speech-Language-Hearing Clinic, elementary schools, hospital and private practice settings. Daves became most interested in working with children who have hearing loss and helping them learn to advance their listening and spoken language skills through technology (e.g., hearing aids, cochlear implants) and auditory verbal therapy.
After graduating in August, she plans to work with children in her local community – as both an early interventionist working with toddlers and preschoolers and with school-age children. She’s confident this is her best path because of the variety of experiences she had during her clinical rotations. Daves also benefited from the mentorship she received from her supervisors during these placements – learning different skills from each of them and borrowing a bit of their styles to develop her own clinical approach.
“There’s a ton of variety available to speech-language pathologists,” Daves says. “You can work with any age, you can work in a school, hospital, nursing home or have your own office. You can choose to work with a specific population such as patients with Parkinson’s disease, children with Autism, or teenagers with traumatic brain injuries.”
“This is great because there are many different opportunities where you can help people,” she adds. “Keep an open mind because you never know what might surprise you.”
