Joseph Harrington: Speech Therapist / Special Education Teacher

News Date: 

Monday, July 27, 2015

Content: 

This month’s Spotlight features Joseph, a former Linguistics major who is now a Speech Therapist, throwing open the doors of communication for children with language impairments.

Joseph, on realizing Linguistics was not what he thought:

"I thought Linguistics was about learning languages, but I took Intro to Linguistics and lo and behold, instead of it being, “Become a polyglot!” it was more, “Here are fifty verbs in Hungarian. Tell us what’s going on.” It was challenging in a way I’d never been challenged in academics before. I was always the kid where everything came kind of easy in school, but Linguistics was so logic-based and so analytical that there was no way for me to succeed unless I knuckled down and applied myself. Actually, when I was working on an assignment for that intro class, a girl I lived with looked over my shoulder while I was frustrated with a problem and said, “You’re not very smart, are you?” I was so offended, it fueled me to ace that class. I guess part of me went, “I’ll show you how smart I am! I’ll get a degree in Linguistics!”

View the full article (PDF)

To go beyond the interview, hear Joseph speak with other alumni on the 2016 Alumni Panel: Full Alumni Panel Video

Joseph welcomes UCSB students to contact him via LinkedIn with ques-tions about speech therapy or special education and for mentorship on how to use your time at UCSB to become competitive in the field. Requests to edit student resumes or inquiries about open positions will not be responded to.

Joseph Harrington

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Editor: Brandilyn Gilbert, Academic Advisor