ACAE CORNER | A Stroll Down Different Undergraduate Pathways Leading to Doctor of Audiology Programs

By James W. Hall III

This article is a part of the September/October 2019, Volume 31, Number 5, Audiology Today issue.

I received the above e-mail message while preparing the manuscript for this article. A colleague at the University of Hawaii referred this undergraduate student to me after she had initially inquired about audiology from a family medicine physician at the university. As a permanent part-time professor at the University of Hawaii (living in Maine and Florida), I teach three online prerequisite courses for academically, geographically, and culturally diverse cohorts of undergraduates interested in applying to a graduate program in audiology or speech pathology.

In one of the courses, Introduction to Audiometry and Auditory Disorders, I unabashedly strive to recruit the best and brightest students into our profession, although, not surprisingly, most are already committed to speech pathology as a career.

I immediately responded enthusiastically to this student, providing her with a link to the Student Academy of Audiology (SAA) portion of the Academy website, reprints of ACAE Corners pertaining to doctor of audiology education, and also an electronic copy of Chapter 1 (“Audiology Yesterday and Today”) from my 2014 textbook Introduction to Audiology Today.

An undergraduate student considering audiology as a career predictably and logically will want to know what prerequisite courses are required for admission to a doctor of audiology program. At this time, there is no well-defined or well-accepted “pre-audiology” curriculum. In the early 1970s, undergraduate students with diverse majors stumbled mostly by chance upon audiology as a career option.