NAME: Jina Koh, MA, CCC-SLP

AGE: 31

COMPANY THAT YOU WORK FOR: St. Jude Medical Center, Fullerton, Calif.

JOB TITLE: Speech-language pathologist

TIME AT YOUR PRESENT JOB: 11 months

Describe what you do.

I am a speech-language pathologist in the inpatient acute rehab unit, serving patients who have suffered neurological injuries, including stroke, spinal cord injury, traumatic and non-traumatic brain injury (due to falls, motor vehicular accidents, encephalopathy). I work on a neurorehabilitation team that includes a physician, physical therapist, occupational therapist, neuropsychologist, recreational therapist, social worker and nurses. As a team, we determine how long patients might need to stay in our program, functional goals for a safe discharge, and how much assistance they will need once they leave the hospital. Once discharged from our program, we may recommend continued therapy on an outpatient basis.

As a speech-language pathologist, I evaluate and treat patients with dysphagia, or swallowing disorders, and cognitive-linguistic deficits, including speech, language, memory, problem solving and attention/concentration. Depending on the areas of the brain that were injured, patients may have various difficulties with their thinking, processing, speech or language. For example, some patients have aphasia, or a loss of language, after a stroke, which might affect their ability to understand language, verbalize their thoughts or find the right words to say, read and write. Speech-language pathologists assess patients’ deficits and determine ways to facilitate communication in the most effective manner for the patients and their communication partners.

What do you find most fulfilling about your work?

Being part of my patients’ lives in a very real way. Helping patients find ways to communicate with their families. Helping families understand what their loved one might be experiencing. Being able to be part of their struggles as well as their recovery process. Seeing patients improve during their stay in the hospital. Seeing them come back for outpatient therapy and seeing how much more they’ve improved over time.

Describe your path here. What other jobs have you held?

I did not know what a speech therapist, or speech-language pathologist, was until years after I finished my undergraduate studies at UCLA. I majored in linguistics and psychology, but did not pursue a career using what I studied. Instead, I worked in the advertising industry as a print production manager and print buyer for five years. I loved my job, but found that the type of work I was doing was not worth the amount of stress I was experiencing. If I was going to be stressed, I wanted it to be about something worth stressing over. About that time, someone at my church mentioned he was going to apply for a graduate program in communicative disorders to pursue a career in speech-language pathology. After learning more about the field, I realized that this was something I wanted to do. So I quit my job and went back to school full-time to get my master’s degree. When I read a description of the communicative disorders major in a course catalog, I kept thinking, “Oh my gosh, this is perfect. This is exactly what I want to do. I can finally apply all the theories from linguistics and psychology in a practical way.”