Make a Difference by Jean

Make a Difference by Jean - May 2023 Scholarship Essay

Make a Difference

When I was in 8th grade my little brother Dylan was suddenly not acting like himself, he stopped really responding to us and expressing what he was feeling. It was like looking at a completely different person. I remember that winter when it all happened because I was prepared to spend my annual birthday dinner at Red Lobsters with my family for my 14th birthday. After a week, my parents turned to our church pastors to pray over him, in hopes to heal him from whatever was happening to him. The following week my parents checked him into Johns Hopkins Children's Hospital, where he and my parents stayed there for a week. That devastatingly long week felt like a month with just my sister and me in the house alone. Relatives would bring home-cooked meals almost every day, while my dad came home every once in a while to take new clothes and wash old ones. “Jean, are you good this year?” That is what my dad said to me after handing me a mini cake on my birthday. He didn’t have to say anything anymore, as I understood what he meant. I couldn’t even think about my birthday with the fact that my 5-year-old brother was in the hospital.
After he was initially diagnosed with autism, the next step my parents took was to find a speech-language pathologist for him. The main focus was helping him start to communicate and express himself again because he had lost all of that knowledge over a short period of time. Unfortunately, the earliest appointment we could get with one was 7-8 months later. Finding a speech-language pathologist for him was a struggle and took a lot of patience because of the demand for them in the field. That was the initial spark of my interest in speech pathology for children who are autistic or have speech disorders. In fact, The Career Expert: Zippia states that, “an increasing number of speech-language pathologists will be needed to work with children with autism to improve their ability to communicate and socialize effectively” and “the need for speech-language pathologists is expected to grow significantly”. Due to the increasing need for speech pathologists in the U.S., my goal is to become a certified pediatric speech-language pathologist and be rewarded with the possibility to contribute to reducing the gap between children's needs and the service providers.
Thinking about what my parents went through and how left in the dark they were when my brother was first diagnosed, breaks my heart. What my family and I experienced with my brother is something that no other family should experience, and even if it is just one person, I want to be the difference in a child's life and offer any time of relief to worrying parents.