My Vision

Immediately following my graduation from Central Michigan University in the Spring of 2017, I attended Leadershape; a week-long leadership conference that challenges you to develop a personal vision of how you would make the world a more thriving place if time and money were not an obstacle. Heading to Leadershape, I already had an idea of what I wanted my vision to focus on — I wanted to work on developing goals that revolved around my passion for Speech-Language Pathology.

My vision is to create a world in which

every student with a disability

is part of an inclusive school environment,

surrounded by advocates.

The passion that I have for children with disabilities, and more specifically for my vision, has stemmed from witnessing my brother face the endless challenges of communication and learning disorders throughout his entire school career. My empathy for children facing these disorders is what has truly inspired me to become an advocate, support system, and service provider for affected children and families. I want to be able to ease the minds of families and lessen the challenges for every child that I work with in the future. The compassion, enthusiasm, and quality care I have witnessed within my brother’s educational team are the qualities that I strive to bring into the lives of clients and their families as a Speech-Language Pathologist in the school setting. I want to create a seamless connection between the responsibilities of a Speech-Language Pathologist, an educational team, and a child’s parents to foster greater educational success in children facing all communication and learning disorders.

While I already had ideas and plans of how I’d be able to make this vision a reality later as a professional, I was struggling at first to see how I could start targeting this vision while in grad school. After following a few blogs for a while and always imagining how I could make something like that my own, I began to imagine how I could use a blog as a tool to help this vision become a reality. Unable to stop thinking about the idea for my blog after leaving Leadershape, I knew it was something I just had to do. During the summer of 2017, my short transition period between undergrad and graduate school, I created laurenkissick.com

Eventually, I would love for my blog to become a place to document, compile, and share my own speech-language pathology experiences, strategies, tips, skills, and resources. My goal is to allow anybody and everybody to become a more informed advocate for children and families facing speech, language, and learning disabilities. Although this blog won’t help me in creating more inclusive school settings, because that’s a goal I’ll be striving towards in my daily work, I know it can help me make the job and scope of a Speech-Language Pathologist less of an unknown.

I absolutely love sharing, documenting, and reflecting on all of the challenges and insanely rewarding outcomes that I get to experience as a Speech-Langauge Pathologist.