Bring in the Best: Project Background
In the field of communication sciences, there is an additional need to attract students at younger ages before they develop a mindset toward other healthcare or scientific fields. The Joint Committee on Recruitment (Council on Academic Programs, American Academy of Audiology and American Speech-Hearing-Language Association) have identified science fairs as ideal, as they are geared toward grades 7 - 12.
With this approach to a younger and broader audience, the expanding scope of practice in speech-language pathology benefits by attracting students from backgrounds other than traditional undergraduate speech-language pathology programs. For example, students of biology, environmental sciences, nursing, physics, psychology, pre-med, health and social services, nutrition, gerontology, and physics can bring useful skills and background to communication science programs.
Finally, because of the declining numbers of researchers and instructors in speech-language pathology, there is a definite need to step up our efforts to attract science-minded youngsters into speech research and teaching.
In a survey by Leslie Elizabeth Neal of Purdue University, it was found that the age that a career choice is made varies widely between physicians, dentists and audiologists. More specifically, it is rare than a youngster selects audiology as a career during high school years. (See survey summary).
For the past decade, the Illinois Academy of Audiology has become involved with the state science fair as a means to recruit youth into audiology careers. Tom Thunder has written two articles about the successes of this endeavor in Audiology Today: Science Fairs: A Road to Recruitment? and Junior Mentoring - A Recruitment Highway? (pdf files).