SPIKE//

1260hours:

Speech Language Pathology is #6.  I’m preeeeetty sure they did not interview first-year school SLP’s while conducting this survey. 

Lolwut?

I’ve been looking for a job as a speech-language pathologist (SLP) for a few weeks. Before graduating I was told there would be hundreds of jobs and that getting one would be like plucking the juiciest plum off a tree. I was not told that the recession would still be going strong or that joblessness would be around 10% (ps, substantially higher in California). 

The reality is that job searching sucks. I want to work in a hospital or a nursing facility. The only way to get a job as an SLP in a medical setting is to work through 3rd party recruiting agencies. This is because hospitals and rehab centers aren’t mom-and-pop organizations; they’re huge national chains that outsource hiring to specialized companies. Although there are hundreds of hospitals and nursing homes in the Bay Area, at none of them is there a friendly HR department I can just pop my head into, shake some hands, smile winningly and land a job. The entire application process is online, detached and impersonal; completely opposite from the career I’m looking for, which involves in-depth human interaction.

Further, since this will be my first year on the job, I’ll need a trained SLP to act as my supervisor. That means I need someone who’ll be around a lot, to ask questions and sign off on my hours for licensure. But hospitals and rehabs often don’t hire people full-time anymore. SLPs work part-time (or worse, per-diem) at multiple locations. This is probably also a side-effect of the economic shitstorm our country is in. Since there are very few full-time SLPs to act as supervisors, most of the agencies won’t put first year students in a medical setting. 

Once I do get a job (and I may be on the brink), I have to wait 8 weeks to receive a temporary license from the state of California. I can’t apply for the license until I have a supervisor, i.e., until I’m officially employed, but I can’t start working until the license comes back from the state. That means two months during which I can’t work and I’m not getting paid. How will I pay my rent? Maybe I can make a lean-to out of the DirectLoan you-owe-us-sixty-grand envelopes I receive, cus there’s gonna be a lot of those piling up.

I’m over-the-top stressed out and I don’t even have a job yet. But will my job be stressful once I start? Let’s see: I’ll be working with terminally ill patients, people with extreme dementia and neurological disease, and people who can’t feed themselves. My caseload will consist mainly of people who, despite my best efforts, probably won’t get better. I will have to be “productive” at least 85% of my working hours and fill out a rainforest’s worth of insurance paperwork daily. Sounds like a walk in the goddamn park. If the folks at CareerCast and Time think that’s less stressful than recruiting people to do my job, or being a pollster, or being a staff writer tasked with creating asinine top-10 lists, then I wish on them severe oropharyngeal dysphagia, a puréed-only diet and an SLP who’s too blissed-out to care.

…

Once I offered to help my friend pass out fliers after a concert; the kind of thing where you push promos into people’s hands as they flood out of a venue. My friend was a pro at her job: eye contact and smiles and before you knew it she was handing you a flier that you didn’t ask for. I couldn’t do it: I felt this incredible pressure and guilt about pushing unwanted stuff onto strangers. I think I handed out like three fliers before becoming completely overwhelmed. I gave my friend the remaining stack and waited by the car feeling like I was going to throw up.

For any job, there’s people who can handle it and there’s people who can’t, and that’s why any top-list of careers is probably missing the point. How do you measure on the job stress against the pleasure making a difference in the life of someone who’s sick? I don’t think there’s a reliable metric for that.