Personal Essay: A Career As A Peer Assistant

Communication starts at the moment of birth. From birth to adulthood, a person develops a method of communication to communicate with our people. This form of communication is called speech. Now just imagine, a person has an incident that makes him to render his speech slowly as people don’t understand or he just can’t speak at all. This is what happen to a family friend of my father’s. He was a type 2 diabetic and he did not follow the lifestyle that a diabetic is supposed to lead to take care of themselves. He had a stroke after the years of not adhering his diet to guidelines given to a person who was diabetic. After his stroke, he lost his ability to communicate some of his modalities across. It would take him hours to get him to say a …show more content…
I have volunteered many places that were recommended by my professors and I have also volunteered at places like nursing homes to see speech therapy on a personal basis. This also led me to take a job in University of Houston as peer assistant as I could learn how to interact with my peers and adults on a general basis. Working as a Peer Assistant, it forced to talk and learn how to talk to people in general in regards of getting information and how to deal with people who have gone through some difficulties in their life. There were many people from different walks of life that wanted to enroll in university of Houston but had no idea how much University of Houston offers. Through time of deciding whether you wanted to enroll at this particular university or not, a lot of the people who apply got through many situations regarding it. Once my eyes were opened to how people are genuinely distressed or not to motivated to apply and get in to University of Houston, I appealed to give this university a chance and advised them on different routes, they could on to get the same result. This job has really taught me so many things of interaction that I wouldn’t have learnt anywhere as a speech language pathologist would need to learn how to interact with people to get their case history and give fair results. Getting out there and volunteering at different places that are speech based is also not a bad way of getting