Third-year Doctor of Audiology Student Penelope Anna Melissas champions the idea that career choices are often affirmed through diversity of experience. As an undergraduate student at the University of Georgia majoring in Communication Sciences and Disorders, she originally planned to be a pediatric speech-language pathologist. After taking an audiology course in undergrad, Melissas found the field offered the perfect combination of humanity, science, and the chance to work with children. Further inspired by her close friend with congenital hearing loss, she knew she wanted to pursue audiology.
“She’s the first person I met that had congenital hearing loss, and listening to her talk about how much her audiologist impacted her and truly shaped her made this field a path for me,” Melissas said.
At the beginning of her first year at Vanderbilt, Melissas chose the pediatric audiology specialty track to confirm whether this was the population she wanted to work with. Led by Dr. Anne Marie Tharpe, former Chair of the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, students enrolled in the pediatric audiology track receive specialized training in caring for infants and children who are Deaf or hard of hearing through additional coursework and practicum experience. One of these unique learning opportunities includes a Maymester immersion program at the end of a student’s second year. During this time, students participate in a full-time clinical placement at a site specializing in child hearing loss.
Often, students are encouraged to branch outside of the Vanderbilt Health community for their Maymester placements. For Melissas, this meant three weeks at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), where she had the opportunity to learn in a variety of different clinical pediatric audiology settings. Despite being in a new clinical environment, she says she felt ready to take on every opportunity thanks to her Vanderbilt training.
“Many of the classroom and clinical experiences that I had at Vanderbilt prepared me for when I got to MUSC,” she said.
Throughout her time at MUSC, Melissas was driven by one core goal: to learn as much as she could from as many people as possible. With a schedule specifically tailored for her, she was able to achieve just that as she gained hands-on experience in infant testing, pediatric vestibular evaluations, hearing aid appointments, cochlear implant workups, and sedated Auditory Brainstem Response (ABR) testing during surgery.
“Every day was different, which I loved,” she explained. “I’ve learned so much about how pediatric audiologists wear a lot of different hats, and how every provider can have drastically different days. They all had different things in their toolbox, and now I’ll have them in my toolbox, too.”
One of the most impactful lessons Melissas learned during her Maymester was how to balance technical proficiency with empathetic patient care. While conducting a cochlear implant workup, she noticed a patient becoming distressed and wondered whether she should stop the exam. With guidance from her supervisor, the experience became an important lesson in recognizing patient needs and adapting care accordingly.
“The audiologist explained to me that students can get really caught up in running tests correctly, setting things up correctly, or doing the math correctly, but that at the end of the day, your patient is a person,” she said. “I saw that mentality everywhere at MUSC, in the way they would change how they spoke during the tests they did or stop when it was too much for a patient. They really highlighted that your patient is human and you need to have empathy for them and understand their perspective.”
From celebrating patients’ successes to gaining confidence in her clinical evaluation skills, Melissas’ Maymester experience has made her more excited than ever about her future in audiology. As she prepares to enter her third year of the program, she plans to apply the knowledge and clinical insights she gained during the experience to her studies and future career.
“I feel changed in a very positive way,” she said. “It was a great experience to step out of the classroom and really envision what my future could look like.”