USU rehabilitations counseling master’s program prepares students for careers
Utah State University offers a master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling, via distance education through the department of special education and rehabilitation and is ranked the 12th best rehabilitation counselor education program in the country.
Twyla Niedfeldt is a deaf student from Wisconsin working on her master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling. She said the program helps people who are mentally or physically disabled find work.
“In a nutshell, rehabilitation counselors help people with disabilities become employable,” she said.
Julie Smart, professor and director of the rehabilitation counseling program at Utah State University said the master’s program in rehabilitation counseling began in 1989.
Smart said, “The State Office of Rehabilitation Counseling in Salt Lake City approached the department of special education at USU and asked the SPED department to write the grant. The special education faculty did write it and got it.”
The name of the department then changed to the department of special education and rehabilitation with a national search beginning for rehabilitation counseling faculty, Smart said.
“We have had over 250 graduates,” Smart said. “USU is one of three rehabilitation counseling master’s programs in the Rocky Mountain West. There is no other rehabilitation counseling program in the state of Utah.
USU has a long history of offering master’s in rehabilitation counseling and for the past decade, students from Alaska to Alabama and New York to Washington have received master’s degrees in rehabilitation counseling.
Twyla Niedfeldt, a deaf master’s student from Wisconsin in the RCE program who is in her second semester with USU had the opportunity to visit Utah State a couple of years ago to attend a Student Leadership Conference and at that time she learned about the distance education option.
She said, “I started thinking seriously about distance education after I returned home from USU. I did some research and compared local programs and accommodations with what was offered or proposed at USU.”
Smart said, “We have two master’s programs – one full-time, on-campus program with 15 students and another distance program with 87 students.”
The distance program takes three years to complete and the on-campus program takes 18 months.
“Distance students take live, interactive weekly courses with the professor sitting on the USU campus,” Smart said. “During the summer, these students travel to Logan and stay in the dorms and take course work on campus.”
Zan Merril, the rehabilitation counseling education project manager, said the most important thing is that the student has access.
She said, “Our online program is different from others because it is synchronous, which means real time, so our distance students attend classes at the same time in the same class that our on-campus students do, they are just on the Internet.”
Niedfeldt said, “The master’s program allows all students to be in the class together, with both on-campus and distance education students accessing the same material directly from the professor and from each other.”
Niedfeldt is able to access all of the information from lectures with the assistance from technical staff.
“My computer skills have greatly improved because of these wonderful “techie” instructors,” she said. “They have worked with me to brainstorm the best method of captioning the lectures, they have graciously added captioning to the online videos when possible, and they are a constant presence in the classroom to ensure that all systems are in prime working order.”
Merril said the students can access this anywhere there is Internet available.
“Most of our students either do it from home or at work because we have our classes in the evenings,” she said.
Niedfeldt said the only negative of the program is that not enough people with hearing loss know about distance education.
“As a pioneer in this program, my goal is to share my experience and open the doors to educational opportunity for other students, particularly non-traditional students who face greater challenges when exploring post-secondary options,” she said.
Smart said, “There are 12 distance rehabilitation programs in the United States. Nonetheless, USU’s distance rehabilitation counseling program is gaining a reputation for providing an equal experience for students who are blind or deaf.”
Merril said, “This is a nationally accredited program and we have been ranked the number 12 program in the country for four years in a row, which is really remarkable because we only have three professors and we have only been around for 10 years and are competing with programs who have dozens of professors and they have been around forever.”
Niedfeldt said, “I am so delighted to be a student at USU and I really look forward to returning to the campus and meeting the faculty and administration members in person.”
-stacipete@cc.usu.edu