Graduate Program
The Communication Sciences and Disorders Department has about 175 undergraduate majors, 80 graduate students, and a faculty and staff of 30.
Students in the Department hail from all over the nation. Upon leaving the University, our graduates enter the clinical, teaching, and research fields throughout the United States. While in school, Communication Sciences and Disorders graduate students conduct original research, participate in symposia, and may serve as research assistants, teaching assistants, or assistant instructors. Many of our students publish scholarly articles or deliver papers at professional meetings. We are proud of the high level of professional involvement of our students. All of those who have earned a Ph.D. in our Department have obtained faculty or other professional positions.
We offer Speech Language Pathology (Ph.D., Master's) and Audiology (Ph.D., Au.D.) programs. Unfortunately we have had to discontinue our graduate program in Deaf Education, and we are no longer admitting students into this particular concentration. The following web site may be helpful to you in locating alternate programs: Deaf Ed. It is not necessary to register and log on the site in order to view the national list of accredited Deaf Education graduate programs.
Our graduate program is tailored to individual students. Students develop a plan of study in consultation with their faculty advisory committees. Ordinarily, an M.A. program is completed in two years and a Ph.D. in three or four years after completion of the M.A. We encourage most students in the doctoral program to create a four year full-time Ph.D. work plan since it is quite difficult to produce a high quality dissertation if the student is not in residence.
Specializations
In response to changes in the ASHA certification standards (the new Knowledge and Skills Assessment–KASA–framework), we have restructured the curriculum to provide a set of core "foundations" courses with comprehensive coverage of the field. These are supplemented by elective course work, which enables students to delve more deeply into topics of special interest or to broaden their expertise. Specialization is still possible, and it is encouraged. But it is done on a more individual basis and with more flexibility than was possible under the previous system of "tracks".
Bilingualism
Students can build a bilingual program to suit their specific areas of interest. For example, a student who is interested in bilingualism can elect the Language Theories and Bilingualism course, instead of the Cognitive and Linguistic Foundations of Language Disorders, in the core course load and Collaborative Models of Assessment and Intervention for Bilingual Populations for one of the two electives. Students who are interested in working with adults can select two additional electives that focus on the adult population, whereas students who are more interested in children can choose electives that focus on the child population. Students who are interested in lifespan issues might select a mix of elective courses.