Activities that enable students to apply their learning in special circumstances or acquire new skills (such as leadership programs)

Seeing Patient Perspectives
by Grace Gleba

This past summer I was fortunate enough to be able to volunteer and observe audiologist, Dr. Jennifer Titus, at the Warren Campus of St. Luke’s Hospital in the Balance Center. A typical day included greeting patients, using technology to examine their level of hearing, cleaning hearing aids, and offering advice on the best solution for their hearing loss.

This experience was significant to me because this is potentially my lifelong career, and I wanted to ensure that this is what will make me happy and that I should continue pursuing a degree in CSD. I experience a bilateral hearing loss and often, patients were embarrassed to admit they couldn’t hear and to wear hearing aids. At times like this, I stepped into my audiologist’s place and explained to them how I wear hearing aids myself and the benefits they have provided me with, therefore showing the patient there was nothing to be afraid of. I loved seeing their reactions when they realized that I wasn’t, in fact, a “normal” hearing individual and proud to witness the resolve they soon showed thereafter. They willfully accepted the challenge of trying out a pair of hearing aids and left the office seeing the glass half full and hearing better than ever.

As a CSD major, my coursework greatly applied to this experience. During my time as a student in audiology class with Professor Leslie Purcell, I learned about the inner workings of an ear, as well as how to graph audiograms when testing for a hearing loss and determine if it’s a sensorineural or conductive hearing loss. My first day working with Jen we conducted an audiogram and while observing her write down the symbols on the audiogram, I found that for the first time (after having been the subject of many audiograms myself), I finally understood what it all meant! It was a cool experience to see how all of the information I studied came together as a whole in just one appointment. It taught me the importance of needing results from every test to put together a cohesive and accurate answer or else the solution will be flawed.

The main lesson I learned is that while it’s necessary to learn about the tools and anatomy of a human, schooling only goes so far. After observing, I found that being able to understand patients is the biggest factor for being a success in the profession. Growing up with hearing aids my whole life I am accustomed to the idea that if you have a hearing loss you need hearing aids. After a patient politely declined a pair during an appointment this summer I struggled to understand why a person would deny themselves the opportunity to improve their quality of life. Jen suggested why one would give up the sense of sound presented to them. This will benefit me in the future because a goal for improving myself is to see things from the patient perspective and understand the choice made, even though it might not be the one I would make.

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Conducting Thesis Research Abroad
by Seamus Wagner

I went to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. I was conducting thesis research into national identity and electoral conflict in Kawe constituency in Dar es Salaam. I developed a survey and assembled a research team to administer the survey within all ten wards within the constituency. We surveyed 152 randomly selected participants within 19 sub-wards. This allowed us to cover a broad range of geographical locations within the city while managing our operational costs. The data collection portion of this project took place during June and July of 2017. The analysis and write-up are still ongoing at the time of this submission, which is late August 2017.

This experience was important because it was my first successful research project that was developed and administered primarily individually. This was important for me as an emerging scholar as it provided the platform to carry-out an original study that personal funding would not have been able to cover. The impact of our research is yet to be determined as neither I nor the graduate student I worked with have submitted anything for publication. Additionally, neither of us has provided any recommendations on how to further maintain/increase the security during the next general elections in Tanzania, scheduled to be held in 2020.

The theory and methodology courses that I took as part of my studies helped prepare my study to be as successful as I could make it. Additionally, the statistics courses I took helped me to work with another graduate student who is primarily qualitatively driven and the two of us could design a questionnaire that incorporated both of our interests and ideas into one item, which greatly simplified administration and further analysis. Furthermore, my courses that dealt with conflict and elections in Africa, particularly within Tanzania gave me a necessary background to conduct research within the country.

I learned and experienced the difficulties involved with gaining approval through the proper channels in a system that is non-automated and requires in-person visits to every office of every ward and sub-ward a project is intending to include before any data collection can take place. The knowledge and experience gained from that was not possible to learn in a classroom setting and requires being personally involved with all aspects, from initial development and approval-seeking, all the way to dispersion of results back to each office and individual that requested them. Moreover, learning how to navigate assembling a team and getting a survey originally written in English ready for administration to a non-native English or non-English speaking region is a skill I needed to develop if I hope to work in similar settings in the future.

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