Today, we’d like to introduce you to Tara Sampson.
Thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I knew from a very young age that I wanted to be a singer. I joined a youth choir when I was about 8 years old, and that was it!
Or so I thought… I started private voice lessons at 12, performed in school choir, plays, and musicals in and out of school, and attended all the camps and classes I could. I ended up majoring in Musical Theater as an undergrad, receiving a BFA in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami.
I moved to San Diego with my husband in 2016 and dove headfirst into the theatre world here – auditioning everywhere I could. I booked gigs consistently and opened my voice studio, Tara Sampson Voice Studio. I filled my days by teaching 10-6 and running to rehearsals from 7-11 pm whenever I was booked. All was well until I had a vocal hemorrhage on stage during a performance.
A vocal hemorrhage is painful and very scary for a singer. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen to my career, so after my ENT gave me the all-clear, I saw a voice therapist. Prior to my injury, I had never heard of voice therapy. I walked into a beautiful office with pianos in every room – it was my slice of heaven. I found out the root of my injury (allergies, not technique, thank goodness!) and worked to heal my voice.
Then, I realized there was so much more I could do with my love of art, music, and education. I took on a voice student who was suffering from Parkinson’s Disease and wanted to use singing to keep her voice strong for as long as possible. I also took on a voice student with cerebral palsy and another two with articulation disorders. I stayed in my lane as a voice teacher, using my vocal and dialectical knowledge to target their goals, all while dreaming of learning more.
When the world shut down in 2020, I took the opportunity to research voice therapy – what type of certifications/degree, etc. would I need to help singers like me? It turns out that you need a master’s degree in communication disorders, a clinical fellowship, and a TON of supervised treatment hours to become a speech-language pathologist (SLP, aka voice therapist, aka speech therapist). So that’s what I got. I spent 3 years doing prerequisite courses and completing a Master of Science in Communication Disorders through Emerson College and have entered into my Clinical Fellowship.
My whacky path hasn’t ended there, though – I want to help singers and other professional voice users who have voice disorders and injuries, but I also have found immense joy in working with young adults with developmental disabilities and traumatic brain injury. I am more at peace now than I ever have been, and I finally feel like I have found my place in the world as an SLP.
Can you talk to us about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned. Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Absolutely not! Serendipitously, one of my biggest hurdles became the springboard for my future success: my vocal hemorrhage.
Vocal injuries are one of the scariest things that can happen to a professional singer, and my husband happened to be deployed at the time, so that was one of the hardest times in my life. I was living thousands of miles away from family and was new to the area, so I didn’t feel deeply connected to any friends yet, so it was excruciatingly lonely and beyond terrifying. Luckily, my injury was caught very early and healed quickly.
The other, and more notable, challenge on my path to becoming an SLP was that my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in my second semester of grad school. In a way, I think this made me focus even more on my studies, as they felt like the only thing in my control at the time.
She and I are extremely close, so her fight with cancer was, to put it mildly, nearly unbearable. She is, and remains to be, the strongest person I know and she beat that monstrous disease. She celebrated her one-year anniversary of being cancer-free this year.
Needless to say, my path has been full of twists, turns, and monsters in the closet, but I am grateful because it got me here and I couldn’t be happier.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Currently, I work for a school district as a Speech-Language Pathologist. I work at the adult transition program, where we prepare students with significant disabilities for life after public school. These students are those who have finished 12 years of school and require a bit more support before they enter the independent world, and we help them to prepare for that.
I have the immense privilege of working with these young adults and helping them communicate to the best of their abilities. So many people underestimate this population, so I do my best to help them communicate their brilliance.
Many of my students require augmented or alternative communication (AAC) devices (think iPads that can do text-to-speech, or eye gaze devices like that of Stephen Hawking), so one of my main responsibilities is to program these devices to each individual’s needs and preferences, then help them learn to navigate and use the device appropriately. Additionally, several of my students have complex medical conditions that require a more medical perspective to keep their swallowing safe.
I believe something that sets me apart in the SLP world is my background as a performer and musician. This helps me in my treatment planning, as it gives me a creative side that can be beneficial in this line of work. Furthermore, my undergraduate program focused heavily on text analysis of plays and communicating ideas to audiences, even when the text is heightened (e.g., Ibsen, Chekhov, Shakespeare, etc.). So much of my work now is with young adults who struggle to communicate their thoughts and ideas, so I have this background to draw upon in working with them.
I also still own and operate the voice studio I opened in 2018, as singing will always be a passion of mine. I am working towards shifting the studio’s focus from teaching voice to rehabilitating injured and disordered voices of professional voice users, as this was my initial driving force for becoming an SLP.
What sets me apart as a voice teacher is my extensive knowledge and training in working with individuals who have voice disorders and injuries. The majority of voice teachers are not also SLPs, and may have excellent and vast knowledge of singing pedagogy, they likely do not have the medical, anatomical, and physiological knowledge of the mechanisms which allow for singing. I teach voice in a very different way now than when I first started teaching over a decade ago, given my graduate studies.
I am very fortunate that I found a love for all aspects of SLP life (voice, swallowing, articulation, language, fluency, and cognition) during my time in graduate school when I initially thought I wanted to focus solely on voice. I am designing my life to allow me to participate in all of these loves, and it is such a magical adventure!
Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
Put yourself out there and keep in contact! I have found that the people in my life whom I consider mentors are those whom I have met through events or engagements that I was nervous about but attended anyway. They became mentors because I made it a point to reach out to them frequently for both advice and friendship.
It is so, so easy to get caught up in your own life and allow months and years to pass without contacting people who could be friends and mentors – don’t fall into that trap! Set alarms/reminders on your phone, write sticky notes, put them in your calendar, and do whatever you have to do to make sure you don’t let important people slip away.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.tarasampsonvoice.com
