Welcome! My name is Lizzy Hutchens, and I am a Mass Communications major at the University of South Carolina. I am from Charlotte, North Carolina, and transferred to UofSC in Fall 2021 from Furman University to finish my undergraduate studies and begin the application process to graduate programs for Speech-Language Pathology.

 

When I first started college in 2016, I began as an Early Childhood Education major, then switched to Computer Science a year later, and landed on Communication Studies after almost three years into college. The path to figuring out what career I wanted in life has not always been a straight one, but communication studies helped me realize that I wanted a career that could combine my understanding of communication with helping people. Speech-Language Pathology is the study of communication disorders, and it is my goal to become a proficient Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) after completing the appropriate steps and schooling.

 

One of the reasons this line of work stood out to me is because, similar to how an SLP provides speech therapy to those with speech/language disorders, I had to undergo several years of vision therapy for my visual processing disorder. The official name of my disorder is eye-tracking disorder, and it was discovered in the middle of my junior year in high school after my grades began declining. My vision therapy expert found that the disorder had left me at a third grade reading level with low reading comprehension, essentially meaning that my brain has trouble making sense of the visual input it receives. I immediately began vision therapy and received unique glasses with prism lenses to retrain my eye-brain connections, and to improve my eye alignment and visual skills. 

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After about six months of vision therapy, my academics and grades improved beyond what I thought possible, and I made Dean’s List for the first time during my high school experience. Since progress can slowly deteriorate if not consistently worked on, I had to continue vision therapy several years later during my time at college, spending a total of one and a half years in vision therapy, but I can say with confidence that it has continuously proven to be effective. I will always remember how empowered I felt after seeing my improvements and success, and it is my goal to help others feel that kind of empowerment and freedom from the areas that they struggle with involving communication. 

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Although I am applying to several Speech-Language Pathology programs, I transferred to UofSC to do more than finish my bachelor’s degree, raise my GPA to the whopping 3.93 that it now currently is, and get inducted into several national honor societies, but also to apply to their SLP program as it is in the top twenty-five schools for this field of work. I am graduating this coming December and aspire to get into UofSC’s Speech-Language Pathology program above all others. If accepted, I will start and finish my master’s degree at UofSC, but regardless of what school I end up attending, I am devoted to staying on this path until I am a certified SLP in the long term. 

 

I have had many impactful experiences within the classroom and beyond, and I think both have led me to the path I am now on. In my ePortfolio, you will see two key insights essays that further explain some of my particularly notable experiences, such as how a class called “Female Gothic Literature” changed and evolved my understanding of communication, and how my time as an assistant teacher/tutor at a low-income middle school transformed how I viewed equality vs. equity/fairness. Also included in my ePortfolio is an organizational leadership project in the form of a podcast that I created based on an interview I conducted with a Speech-Language Pathologist to analyze communication struggles amongst coworker/peer relationships. Feel free to look into them and learn some more about who I am and how I got to where I am now.