Advice Please - College Choices

JHS
Tue, 27 Feb 2007 09:56:52 +0000

One of the things that makes Georgetown more prestigious than Loyola is that it doesn’t offer para-professional majors like speech therapy. That’s just part of what it means to go to a more academically-oriented institution. If you look a layer or two under the surface, I’m sure you’ll find that Georgetown offers 90% of the courses Loyola does, and that it’s perfectly possible to get accepted at a good graduate program coming out of Georgetown if you’ve prepared adequately. I have a niece who wants to be a speech therapist and attends a university that does not have a specific speech therapy program; she is not having any trouble qualifying herself for a masters program, except that she has to work a bit to get the kind of internship training that is probably relatively painless to find at a place like Loyola.

There’s another, somewhat delicate issue to consider: There will be a huge difference between the students in a speech therapy program at Loyola and the general undergraduate population at Georgetown. With whom will your daughter feel most comfortable, and most excited? The prospective-speech-therapist’s older sister is a professional acrobat who has long wanted to be a physical therapist when she retires from performing, When she went to college, she chose a physical therapy program and just hated it – she thought the kids were narrow and unintellectual, and the courses too watered down. She wound up in a pre-med program at another university, where she was much happier. Her credentials will be fine when she finally goes to get her PT training.