Why I Chose Speech-Language Pathology as an English Major
“English major” and “future Speech-Language Pathologist” are not two identities most people expect to hear in the same sentence.
In fact, when I graduated from The University of Alabama in May of 2025 with a bachelor’s degree in English and announced my plans to pursue a Master’s of Science in Speech-Langauge Pathology at The University of Montevallo — people often asked me how I “made the jump” from “books to speech therapy”. Whenever I told them I would specifically be graduating with a Bachelor’s of Art in English with minors in Psychology and Communication Disorders, I would watch the confusion deepen in real time as they wondered, often aloud, why I chose to combine an arts major with minors largely considered to be more STEM-oriented.
At first glance, the two fields may seem unrelated. One is often associated primarily with literature, writing, and storytelling. The other is more often associated with healthcare, clinical settings, and professional intervention and treatement plans. However, to me, the transition never felt like a sudden shift, nor abandoning one passion for another. Instead, it felt like following the same thread toward a natural (as well as exciting and rewarding) path.
I have always been fascinated by communication — not just speech itself, but the deeply human need to express, connect, understand, and be understood. Long before I knew what Speech-Language Pathology truly was, I was an avid reader who excelled in English throughout grade school. Language Arts remained my favorite subject from elementary through high school, where I eventually took AP Language Arts courses.
Some of my earliest memories of falling in love with language come from my third grade classroom. My teacher, Mrs. McCants, gave us daily creative writing prompts throughout the school year, encouraging us to create stories of our own. It was the first time I realized that stories were not just things I could consume, but things I could create. From that point on, I wrote constantly. What began as a childhood hobby slowly became a defining point of who I was.
That passion for writing led to me receiving a National Gold Medal from The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in 2019, an achievement that made me realize my voice and stories could reach beyond my small Alabama hometown. As I headed into my senior year of high school in 2020, I still did not know exactly what I wanted my professional future to look like, but I knew I loved every facet of Langauge Arts and the ways it allowed people to communicate stories, identities, emotion, and experiences both fictional and real. So, when I enrolled at The University of Alabama, I declared English as my major.
As an English major, I studied the ways language shapes identity, relationships, culture, and emotion. I spent years analyzing stories and searching for meaning in the ways people choose their words. What I did not realize at the time was that this fascination with communication would eventually lead me into a clinical field dedicated to protecting, initiating, supporting, and restoring it.
By 2022, I had added Psychology to my degree as a second area of study simply because I found the human mind fascinating. I wanted to better understand why people think, behave, feel, and connect the way they do. Psychology, in a way, felt like a natural extension of the questions I was already asking though literature and writing. If English explored the stories people tell, Psychology explored the internal systems behind them.
For a while, I considered whether I might pursue counseling or therapy professionally. I was drawn to the idea of helping people navigate emotion, identity, and relationships. At the same time, I also began thinking about Psychology in a more practical sense and how it might complement my English degree in unexpected ways. I joked that I was accidentally creating a “pseudo-marketing degree,” combining communication, audience analysis, writing, persuasion, and human behavior into one academic path.
Even then, though, there was a common thread running beneath every interest I pursued: communication. Whether I was studying literature, psychology, media, storytelling, or rhetoric, I kept returning to the same questions. How do people express themselves? How do relationships form through language? What happens when communication breaks down? And how can we better support people in being understood?
Ironically, the questions that would ultimately shape my career were answered for me in an English class.
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During my time at The University of Alabama, I enrolled in Dr. Robert Poole’s course, “How English Works,” expecting to learn more about grammar, language structure, and linguistics. Instead, I walked into a class that completely reframed the way I thought about communication itself. For the first time, I was introduced to linguistics not simply as an academic discipline, but as a lens through which we can understand human behavior, cognition, development, culture, and connection.
One unit in particular stayed with me long after the semester ended: communication disorders and the role of Speech-Language Pathologists.
Up until that point, I had only a vague understanding of what Speech-Language Pathology actually was. Like many people, I associated it mostly with speech therapy in schools. But as we discussed language acquisition, aphasia, articulation disorders, fluency, cognition, literacy, swallowing, and developmental communication differences, something clicked into place for me. The field seemed to combine everything I had spent years gravitating toward without realizing it: language, psychology, healthcare, counseling, education, advocacy, science, and human connection.
For the first time, I could clearly see a profession that did not require me to abandon my love for language in favor of practicality. Instead, it asked me to deepen it. The analytical side of English, the emotional insight of storytelling, the behavioral questions explored in Psychology, and my growing fascination with communication all suddenly converged into one path.
I left that class realizing I could do more than simply study communication. I could help support it in people whose ability to communicate had been interrupted, delayed, altered, or overlooked.
Not long after taking Dr. Poole’s class, I added a Communication Disorders minor to my degree. It felt like the first academic decision I had made that aligned every part of my interests instead of forcing me to choose between them. For the first time, I could clearly see how my love for language, psychology, storytelling, advocacy, and human connection could exist within the same profession.
At that point in my undergraduate career, changing my major entirely was not a realistic option. Because of my financial aid timeline, switching degree paths would have likely extended my time in school beyond what my aid would cover. But in many ways, I am grateful things unfolded the way they did. Keeping my English major while pursuing Communication Disorders allowed me to approach Speech-Language Pathology from a perspective I may not have otherwise developed.
As I progressed through the minor, the field only continued to confirm itself as the right fit for me. I shadowed several Speech-Language Pathologists and became increasingly drawn to the breadth of the profession and the relationships clinicians build with the people they serve. I also volunteered with The University of Alabama Speech and Hearing Clinic’s Pediatric Feeding and Swallowing Clinic, where I was able to observe the profound impact communication and feeding support can have on both children and their families. Watching clinicians combine scientific knowledge with empathy, adaptability, and advocacy solidified my desire to enter the field myself.
By 2024, I had begun applying to graduate programs in Speech-Language Pathology. When I received an offer from The University of Montevallo, I accepted enthusiastically, and in August of 2025, I officially began graduate school. After years of following interconnected interests without fully understanding where they were leading me, I finally felt as though I had arrived at the place they had been pointing me toward all along.
Now, as I continue through graduate school, I sometimes look back on the path that brought me here and realize that it makes far more sense in hindsight than it ever did while I was living it. What once felt like scattered interests — writing, psychology, storytelling, advocacy, communication, media — were never really separate from one another at all. They were all different ways of trying to understand people and the ways we connect with one another.
Speech-Language Pathology ultimately gave me a way to bring all of those passions together into something tangible and meaningful. It allowed me to see communication not just as an academic interest, but as something deeply tied to dignity, autonomy, relationships, and quality of life. I may have entered college believing I wanted to tell stories, but somewhere along the way, I realized I also wanted to help people tell their own.
The more I learned about Speech-Language Pathology, the more I realized it was not simply a field about “fixing speech,” as many people assume. It is a field rooted in advocacy, autonomy, literacy, cognition, accessibility, swallowing, counseling, and above all else, human connection. SLPs help people communicate across all modalities and stages of life, from toddlers learning language for the first time to adults rebuilding communication after illness or injury.
For me, pursuing Speech-Language Pathology as an English major was never a dramatic career pivot. It was the moment I realized that my love for language could become a way to directly support people in finding, protecting, or reclaiming their voices.
