All About a Career as an SLP with Meera Deters- Episode 81

Read the full transcript here

Today, on the All About Audiology Podcast, Dr. Saperstein speaks with Meera Deters, who is a Speech Language Pathologist (SLP) from Texas. Throughout her career she has worked in multiple setting including a cancer hospital, a skilled nursing facility, and an in and outpatient rehab for people with brain injuries and strokes. She also has worked with individuals of different ages. Currently, she works with patients at their own homes through her  own practice, which is called Super Speech Solutions

This week on the All About Audiology podcast:  

• 3:30 – Shadowing a trained professional, within a field of interest, can give you an inside look into the field and allow you to decide if such a field might be suitable for you.

• 7:00 – Students, within the SLP field, who are unsure what they want to specialize in can figure out their exact path as time goes on. One does not even have to technically specialize in anything and can be a generalist.

• 10:00 – For younger clients, in-person therapy is preferred due to the heavy focus on play-based therapy. Although in-person therapy is mainly preferred, Zoom may be a better fit for older children and adults.

• 12:00 – Children with Autism can benefit from working with a SLP on skills such as  receptive language, pragmatics, social language, social skills and non-verbal cues.

• 15:00 – It is important to keep the parents of a younger client in the loop to help them understand what the therapist and their child is working on

• 17:00 – Working on accent modification, or accent reduction, skills allows one to work on their speech and language use with a goal of allowing one to be more intelligible to others

• 23:00 – Working with patients of all ages can make you more marketable as a professional 

For more resources and research visit:

All About Audiology Website 

All About Audiology Facebook group  

All About Audiology Instagram

And the Prodana pay-it-forward platform here: https://prodana.org/practioner/lilach-saperstein/audiology-counseling–dr–lilach-saperstein

(Guest Links)

https://superspeechsolutions.com/

Find Meera on : Instagram

Find Meera on Facebook: Super Speech Solutions, LLC

Find Meera on: LinkedIn

Email Meera at: meera@superspeechsolutions.com

Related Episodes

• All About Collaborating with Speech Language Pathologists – Episode 74- with Dr. Leah Beekman
• Episode 56 – All About Early Intervention: Speech and Language Development
• All About Speech Therapy – Episode 19 with MariLouise Nichols

Listen Next:

All About Celebrating a 3rd Anniversary – Episode 82 

Transcript:

Dr. Lilach Saperstein

Welcome back to the All About Audiology Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Lilach Saperstein, and this is the show where we talk about Audiology and also related fields, speech pathology—basically anything around communication. And we have many families listening to the show, many professionals, and lots of students as well of communication sciences. So I think this one’s for you, my dear students, listeners of the show. We’ve had podcasts talking about medical SLPs and practice in school and all different things that our amazing Speech Language Pathology colleagues do and I’m excited to continue that conversation with today’s guest. Meera Deters is a speech language pathologist—is gonna give us a lot of information, insight and advice. So welcome to the show, Meera.

Meera Deters

Thank you so much for having me on. I’m happy to be here.

LS

I’m very excited. I’d love to hear first, a little bit about your background and how you even heard about Speech Language Pathology, and what was your kind of journey to become one? 

MD

Sure. So, I’ve been practicing as a speech pathologist for 14 years. I honestly can’t believe it’s been that long. It’s gone by super fast. I actually didn’t know anything about speech pathology, or it’s also called speech therapy. After high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do in college in terms of majoring, in terms of studying. So, my dad actually had been working with speech therapists at the hospital. So, he’s a radiologist, and he’d been working with speech therapists at the hospital. He would consult with them on swallow studies. So, when people have trouble with swallowing, oftentimes, they may get an imaging study, which involves a speech therapist and a radiologist together. So, my dad actually suggested I come to the hospital and said, “Hey, why don’t you see what speech pathologists do? You can figure out if that’s something you’d like or not. Let’s just see what you think,” so I said, “All right.” So, I actually spent a total of two weeks at the hospital just observing what speech pathologists, occupational therapists, and physical therapists all do, and I have so much respect for my colleagues and co-workers, and I’ve met all kinds of cool audiologists, and occupational therapists and physical therapists. But really, I mean, I don’t feel like I’m not strong physically, and I thought, “Wow, to be an occupational therapist, or physical therapist would be personally pretty hard for me. I don’t know if that’s something that I would be good at,” but the second, I saw what a speech therapist does, literally, I just thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, and right away, I thought to myself, “Man, I want to be the person who’s helping someone with their communication,” and I still remember to this day—I mean, this kind of gives me goosebumps even now, because I was actually shadowing a speech therapist at the hospital, and she had gone into some kind of intensive care unit. So I remember we had to gown up to see the patient, and he had suffered some kind of wounds and I remember she was helping him with voice therapy, and so she was helping him figure out how he could use his voice to communicate, and I just found it so fascinating. What I still find fascinating about the field is that there’s just so many different areas you can specialize in, and honestly, you can never get bored. So it’s really just great, and very fascinating.

LS

That’s so good, and that’s such a good opportunity that you were able to have that shadowing, observing time, and I also always recommend that to anyone who’s considering—should I do audiology or speech or what should I—just go just call up the clinic or hospital and try to figure out how to get a couple hours observation or even longer, and not only that, it gets you kind of relationships and networking, as well, which is also very helpful.

So I do want to give people opportunity to even go on YouTube, or go on Instagram and look up—

MD

Oh, modified barium swallow studies? 

LS

Thank you. Yes, exactly. Yes. So like, yes—

MD

Or MBS for short. Yeah. [Laughs]

LS

And then you can see it’s really cool because it’s an x-ray of someone swallowing. Is it just an x ray? It is right?

MD

It is.

LS 

It is, right? So it is very cool. You can kind of see the tongue moving and [the] swalling. So if you don’t have the opportunity to actually observe it, you could still check it out online. 

MD
Yeah, it is fun. I agree.

LS

That’s another part of the podcast, and what we’re doing here is that you can connect with people all around the world from different professions and kind of do some of this work, especially in a post pandemic life, when a lot of things are online. There’s still so much opportunity for this kind of questioning and looking on Instagram hashtags. Definitely. Instagram is where I hang out @allallaboutaudiologypodcast. I was recently talking about that Facebook can get really overwhelming and maybe rant-y. It’s got a different energy, and then Twitter is so quick and short and you have to be—but put an Instagram is like right in that sweet spot of captions of images, and you can kind of make a full point without it getting out of hand. I don’t know. So, I’m a fan of Instagram.

Anyway, back to [the] journey. So, did you major in speech therapy—is what happened then in college?

MD

Well, technically, yeah. That’s actually an intere