At an early phase in my career journey, this misinformation made me question if audiology really was worth pursuing. Was audiology really a “dying field” going the way of travel agents and video stores? Despite learning some specific reasons audiology is often abased and its value questioned in the healthcare world, I also came upon a reaffirmation: the hearing health of consumers hinges on much more than a product. Here I share my personal motives for electing audiology as a specific career path and why—despite all the disrepute—I continue to choose audiology.

The Real Truth About Audiology and Hearing Aids

I am currently in my last year of completing my undergraduate studies at Texas State University. This is the most important semester of my life thus far—it’s my last graded semester before I apply to audiology doctorate programs.

The humiliation from the dizziness stopped as I entered high school. I was fortunate enough not to experience a single vertigo episode during school hours for all 4 years. Still, I faced another type of embarrassment with my hearing loss, as it had progressively gotten worse as I became a teenager. I experienced this embarrassment in almost every school setting: in class when my teacher would ask me a question, at lunch with a thousand students' overlapping words, or walking to my next class with the boy I had a crush on but saying “what” every other sentence because the sound of all the stomping footsteps drowned out his voice.

There was no break, and for the first year of high school, I had even refused to get a hearing aid. I begged my audiologist to find an alternative option because I didn’t want to be known as the “teenage girl with a hearing aid.” Hearing aids were for old people!

But eventually, my audiologist fitted me with my first hearing aid and showed me how it was actually kind of cool. I felt a lot more confident walking through my high school hallways with friends and replying to the question a teacher would ask me because I knew I heard them correctly. Also, having the ability to secretly listen to music throughout the day made my classmates jealous of my Bluetooth hearing aid!

Finding pride in my hearing loss did not come easy. I could not have done it alone. I chose to study audiology because I discovered there is no shame in being a person who is hard of hearing or deaf. There is no shame in having dizziness, and I’d like to improve the quality of life for people with hearing and balance disorders, just like my audiologist helped to improve mine.

In short, there is plenty of inspiration in audiology. Audiology is about giving people the tools, the expertise, and the follow-up care to succeed.

There is a counseling aspect to audiology that many consumers do not recognize. A marketed hearing aid could not have done everything my audiologist did for me. Audiology may be debased as an overly specialized field, and mistakenly viewed for now as a profession tied to a commodity. But this stigma won’t last. The commoditization of hearing aids won’t help a child overcome the humiliation that is tied to being a young person with hearing loss.

Grief and resentment are emotions associated with experiencing hearing loss. Refusing to receive proper treatment is a form of denial, which withholds learning about what a person’s loss means for them.

An OTC hearing aid won’t support a person trying to accept their hearing loss as something real and important to address, and it’s highly unlikely a first-fit button can program a hearing aid for all their unique hearing needs. The counseling portion of audiology is of equal importance to the science aspect of hearing remediation. The lack of high compensation and the surplus of student debt encountered in the audiology profession is a small price to pay with respect to changing a person’s negative outlook on hearing loss into something hopeful.

I continue to choose audiology because of what I learned from my own hearing loss, and because people need audiologists.