I had the opportunity to attend the Speech-Language and Hearing Association of Virginia (SHAV) conference from March 22nd – 24th, in Williamsburg VA.

As an undergraduate student I had always heard about the SHAV conference and how it was a fantastic experience, it was great finally experiencing it for myself as a first year graduate student! I got to attend different sessions throughout the weekend and present my student research to SLPs across Virginia.

I attended 4 sessions: “Social Pragmatic Communication Disorders: Best practice for intervention,” “Integrating Early Intervention into the Classroom,” “Using Applied Behavior Analysis to increase session outcomes,” and “Getting started in Telepractice.” These sessions gave me insights to portions of our field that I have not had the chance to explore yet, and ideas for implementing practices into my current therapy sessions.

On Friday, my research team presented our poster in the Graduate Research Poster Session. 6 Longwood teams competed with other graduate-level students from CSD programs across the state. The poster session was great practice for presenting at Longwood’s Graduate Student Research Symposium in April. Professionals across the state gave my research team wonderful insights and got us thinking about new directions for future research.

I am excited to attend the SHAV conference as a fully licensed SLP in the not-too-far future!