Hello and welcome back for another edition of the Future Ear Radio podcast! This week I’m joined by the brilliant Christina Coppola who is a Vestibular Audiologist at the American Institute of Balance. During this episode we discuss:
- Christina’s backstory, the long history of practicing medicine in her family, and how she decided to pursue Audiology
- Her externship at the American Institute of Balance (AIB) and why she gravitated toward the vestibular side of the profession
- Joining AIB full time which has now culminated in her helping to design and implement AIB’s “MatchMe” Program
- The specifics of MatchMe Program and how this is beneficial for both students that are entering the work force and existing practices that are looking for vestibular-oriented talent
- The advantages of young professionals gaining specialty experience to help “future-proof” themselves
An awesome conversation with one of the brightest young Audiologists that I’ve been fortunate to meet about a pretty fascinating new offering within the Audiology space.
-Thanks for Reading-
Dave
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Dave Kemp:
All right, everybody. And welcome to another episode of the FuturEar Radio Podcast. I am very excited for this episode today. I’m joined by my good friend, Christina Coppola. Christina, thanks for coming on, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
Yeah, thanks so much, Dave. I’m so happy to be here. I think this podcast is fantastic. I love what you’re doing with it. So really excited to be a guest on here.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
So I am Christina Coppola, as Dave said. I am a vestibular audiologist. [inaudible 00:00:38] an equilibrium specialist, if you will, at the American Institute of Balance in Largo, Florida. So I went to UCF for my undergrad. I actually majored in, it was an interdisciplinary study track, biomedical science, social science, and health, all combined. And then I went to the USF Audiology Graduate Program and got my doctoral degree in audiology and was, for my fourth year residency or externship, came to AIB and loved it. The moment I walked on the property, I knew that I wanted to be here. I wanted to be a part of the team here and they signed me on after graduation.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
So since then, I’ve been a clinician throughout the entirety of me being here. But while I was within my residency, the CSC program kind of started to become less of just an idea, talked about, murmured in the hallways, and more so a reality that we’re all dealing with. So I kind of watched the CSCs flourish and come to be what it is today. So I’ve grown to be very involved in that process as well. So, if any of the listeners have heard Dr. Joe Sakumura’s episode a couple episodes ago, he talked a lot about the CSCs. And so, I am a clinical consultant and overreader for that program. And aside from that, I’ve really just embraced the having students and being a preceptor. And I’ve since taken over the student program at AIB. So that includes, not only us facilitating preceptorship for our externs, but also we have a university program, which I can talk a little bit about in a few minutes. And we also have the AIB Match Me program, which I’m really, really excited to talk about today.
Dave Kemp:
Wow, fantastic. Great to have you on. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know the whole AIB team over the course of the last year. And it’s really cool what AIB has sort of seems to embody, which is you have Richard and you have all of these young professionals that are, that he’s kind of mentoring, it seems. And I just have really enjoyed getting to know you all and kind of hearing all your different back stories, your different areas of expertise. And it’s like you’re a high performing team, and I think you’ll all play different roles within that team. Like you said, I had Joe on and he really outlined the way that the whole CSCs work, these Centers of Specialty Care, but it’s way more than just one person. There’s a whole team behind it. And it seems as if you’re all really kind of catching fire with the way that this is becoming a real offering in the industry, and more and more private practitioners are hopping on board and making this a part of their offering.
Dave Kemp:
So wanted to bring you on to talk about a lot of the different things that you mentioned there in your intro. I guess let’s just start with your backstory. How you came into the field of audiology and it sounds like medicine has been something that’s been a theme within your family history. So if you wouldn’t mind sharing a little bit about your own backstory.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
Yeah, absolutely. So I always knew that I was more medically oriented. I come up from a family, my mother was actually a respiratory therapist and my father is a cancer researcher. So he’s a gastrointestinal pathologist and has been for many years. So, they’ve kind of tried, through inception or whatnot to get me to kind of follow along their path. And while I really knew that I always wanted to do something within the healthcare community, I didn’t necessarily want to take on exactly under their wing. So I kind of had my, you know, I was perusing around in college, the different healthcare realms and things like that. And basically what brought me to audiology was just I was extremely attracted to neuroscience and as well as the auditory system. So my whole goal was to couple the two and marry them. And so did, through quick research and searches, I came upon audiology. I found out that it was a four year doctoral degree and the last year was largely a externship, full immersive opportunity.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
So I came into the program, bright eyed and bushy-tailed for the first year or two really soaking up all of that anatomical and physiological information. Just really astounded by the mechanisms of the ear and its connection to the brain and so forth. I know you’re not an audiologist, but do you know actually the mechanism of sound entering the system?
Dave Kemp:
Everything I’ve learned is just through conversations like this. I am a layman through and through, but I feel like through osmosis, I’ve picked up a lot of this stuff, but if you want to describe it, that would-
Christina Coppola, AuD:
Yeah, I mean, just quick.
Dave Kemp:
You can refresh my memory.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
A quick nerd out. So sound basically enters the ear, moves these bones, which push upon the cochlea, and basically this sound or fluid vibration travels down through the cochlea, depending on whether or not it’s a low frequency or a high frequency, it either travels longer or shorter. So, you can hear men’s voices in a big room and not so much women’s voices booming, that’s because low frequencies travel farther. So they all resonate on this cochlea, which then stimulate exact nerves that are tonotopically organized. And then that sends the message up to the brain. So, you think about things as a single frequency, but we know that all of the noise that we hear around us is layers and layers of complex sound. So the fact that our ears take in that information, all embedded in a matrices on top of one another, and then that signal gets sent up to the brain and your brain’s able to parse out different patterns of things that it recognizes like speech, environmental noise [inaudible 00:07:19].
Dave Kemp:
In real time.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
Just insane. Just completely, and it’s so tiny. It’s just insane. So that I was just blown away by, and I needed to do something within this field, because I just thought it was so awesome.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
So, loved psychoacoustics, loved anatomy and physiology, all those really great courses, then coming more so at the later years within the graduate program, you get more and more integrated into clinic and less so into some of the theoretical background of the courses. And so in that, I kind of realized pretty quickly that, it sounds obvious now to say it, but what hearing doctors do is assess and treat hearing loss. And so, I know that sounds really obvious now, and for me to say it now, it’s like duh, but I felt that I wanted something more multifaceted and I wanted something more integral between professions.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
So, like I said, my background was in interdisciplinary sciences. And so, I really, really valued the idea of cross-disciplinary communication and multidisciplinary approaches to rehabilitation and treatment. And so, that’s what kind of guided me towards a practice similar to vestibular science. But I hadn’t taken the course yet, and I didn’t know too much about it, because within audiology and the doctoral programs, my interpretation of it is that essentially they put everything vestibular in a box and you don’t touch it until you get there. Whereas with other subspecialties, like cochlear implants or pediatrics, different medical audiology, it’s all touched upon briefly in every single course. You learn what the candidacy criteria is for hearing aids and cochlear implants, and you learn the different norms for peds and adults. But you do have that specialty course, you have pediatrics and you have CIs as their own course, but it didn’t seem, you know, that’s all involved in hearing. So it didn’t seem like they had anything crossing over between courses, addressing vestibular science. I think because it was just this kind of abstract idea. So different from hearing. And so, I think professors were largely uncomfortable teaching that at a graduate level, in a graduate level course when they weren’t too familiar with it based on their own experiences within the profession.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
So that’s one of the reasons actually, where we decided that the university program was a really, really good idea to kind of fill this need within the field. So, if you don’t know, AIB offers a university program to both either universities or students themselves, and essentially it’s for per student, no more than the cost of a textbook. And we have all the course outlined. We have video labs, they can have live labs via Zoom with us. And we’ve constructed the examinations, and we grade them and everything. So, if a university has an issue filling the role of the vestibular professor, we’re able to help them do that so that they can provide their students world class education on this subject.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
And so, I do think that that is one of the ways in which we can kind of guide help and guide the future of audiology to be more accepting for vestibular science. Another one of those ways is the Match Me program, because it’s really, really great if you have all that foundational knowledge. As I said in my previous story, I loved the foundational knowledge of audiology, but when I got to the clinical realities of it, it was entirely different from what I expected.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
So, the Match Me program is there to also allow students who are more vestibular oriented opportunities to get clinical experiences. So essentially this is for a fourth year or third year, if you’re a third year program, but your externship year, we take your geographic preference and your clinical preferences, and we match you with a site that can fulfill those things. So those sites are sourced from our Centers of Specialty Care, and they are just absolutely crazy about the idea of taking in students. And we are the ones who know the students that want to be in vestib, because they’ve typically applied to be at our residency. So we’re in a really awesome opportunity to help kind of bridge the gap between two parties that have mutual interests.
Dave Kemp:
What’s so cool is every single time I interact with you all, it’ll be a few months we’ll have passed and something new comes along. And so, for this last time, this last iteration, when we were in St. Louis at AAA, I was talking with you and you were describing this whole Match Me program. And again, it’s just one of these things that is such a, it’s so brilliant for a number of reasons. So I’ll just kind of list out my reasons and then we can kind of start to talk through them. But for me, okay, first of all, I think that if you’re a young professional entering into the field of audiology and you know that there are these threats on the horizon, well, what can you do to sort of future proof yourself? One way that you can do that would be to sort of specialize your whole acumen and make your, from a professional standpoint, not only are you an audiologist, but you have some level of specialty, so that you’re just even more indispensable, it just sets you apart that way.
Dave Kemp:
The other thing is on the employer side. So a few episodes ago, I interviewed Shadi Chakoutahi, and I think I got her last name right. Maybe not. And she was describing, as a recruiter, the challenges that all of the different employers in this industry are facing, and we talked a lot about private practice and why there doesn’t seem to be a lot of interest in wanting to go into private practice. And again, I think it’s all kind of rooted in this idea of what’s the longevity of private practice audiology. And I think if it’s rooted in the paradigm of selling hearing aids, I don’t know the answer to that question. However, what you’re all doing is presenting a totally new paradigm, I think, of it’s not a replacement, it’s an augmentation. And so, I think that that’s what’s really cool about this is that you’ve created this thing with the AIB in general, and then now being able to start to shepherd along the new generation into this specialty and say, first of all, it’s going to make you even more valuable in the labor market. Second of all, it’s going to provide you with a totally diversified type of revenue stream. And we can get into, you had mentioned, you’re doing the overreads, and I think that’s a really important part of everything that you do.
Dave Kemp:
But I think that ultimately what it comes down to is it just makes your offering that much more compelling, because it’s a win-win for both the potential employee, the students, and then also for all the different Centers of Specialty Care that you’re feeding these soon to be specialized audiologist into their practices and saying, here’s someone that we’re training basically on your behalf to be a liaison of the AIB within your own clinic. That’s so valuable to me.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
It really is. And you’ve got to think, when we go to these conferences and we meet with audiologists and they’re buying into the idea, they see the importance of it, and they’re ready to put the rubber to the road, but they just don’t know how or who will be doing it. The students are just an obvious option, because these audiologists they’re comfortable fitting hearing aids, they’re comfortable programming CIs, whatever they’re doing within their practice, they’re successful at it. And they want to keep doing that. Yes, they see the importance of the vestibular side of things and implementing that into their practice as well, but not everyone has a full salary to take on someone to do that. And so, a student would be an awesome option for them to continue to keep up on their side of things. The hearing aids, whatever their practice is specializing in, and then the student then can take on all of that responsibility of the learning process and things like that to get them on board.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
And I’m glad that you mentioned that we’re training them because there’s a bootcamp that we put our own residents through that essentially is a week long. And so, if you go to one of our Centers of Specialty Care as a student, you are invited to that bootcamp. So you come down to AIB headquarters for a week and learn all of that great foundational knowledge that you’re going to need to move forward and start seeing patients. So you learn from the senior staff here, and the ins and outs of exactly what you’ll be doing. And then once you go back and you’re shipped off back to your respective locations, we maintain a mentorship between us and that practice, and the student can benefit from further distance trainings and consultations and things like that. So it’s a really, really great option, not only for a student, but also it plays into the success of our CSCs as well.
Dave Kemp:
Yeah. I mean, I think that, again, I just keep putting myself in the shoes of a lot of the private practitioners within this industry have been at it for a while. And it’s just sort of like if you’re really busy and you’re occupied, it’s probably feels pretty daunting to man, I have to take upon something that is potentially as, in scope, it could grow to as large of an offering as one that I’ve been focused on for the last 20 years. And so, I think that providing them with this alternative where you say, look, you can become a Center of Specialty Care and we’re going to help onboard you and all this stuff. And now what you’re providing them with this Match Me program is in addition to that, we’re actually going to train this young professional that’s going to come in and they’re going to be the one that’s actually kind of taking the lead on this whole thing.
Dave Kemp:
And obviously there’s a lot of training involved on lots of different facets, not necessarily just all of the vestibular stuff, but I just find this to be, it really caters to the gap that’s in the market right now, which is again, I think we can all recognize that there are a lot of other really exciting revenue generation opportunities, but it’s a matter of like, how do you make those digestible, feasible, approachable? How do you make these something that people look at and they say, all right, I actually can take that on. And this is just one more layer to that whole thing of making it feel like, okay, this is manageable. I can do this.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
Yeah. If you’re a practice looking for a student who’s interested in vestib, how are you supposed to find them? In every class there’s maybe one, two. And so, other than posting on the list serves, which not everyone’s a part of, there’s really no other option. And we kind of modeled this, not that we’re necessarily making the exact matches and saying, you’re going here for your externship. We did model it a little bit after the medical schools. They do a matching. And so, everything we do, we try and kind of model other healthcare professions and what’s been done before. So this is kind of our way, our adaptation of that, where we’re just simply putting the student and the sites in contact. Making our recommendations and promoting particular students that we have interviewed and see favorable. And then that site can then take on the final interview and ultimately make the final decision on who’s the best fit for their practice.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
So it’s an awesome, awesome networking opportunity for both students and practices. And I just really, just kudos to Dr. Gans for making the environment here at AIB such an awesome, welcoming, innovative environment to work in. Because, as you mentioned before, all of the parts of AIB, all of the subsects and things like that, all fit into one another perfectly. They play into each other the way that gears kind of connect and play into each other within an engine, what have you. Because if you know the history of AIB, we’ve been around for 30 years. So we’re coming up on our 30 year anniversary. Education has been a large portion of what we do here. Yes, we’re a private practice clinic, but we’ve been educating PTs for about 20 years, and we educate 1200 PTs and OTs to do this treatment every single year.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
So we have a large network of providers that are able to help patients that are diagnosed. So that feeds into this new idea of the CSC where we can get them diagnosed. Okay, well, now they’re diagnosed in Arkansas, what do I do with this patient? They can’t come to physical therapy in Tampa. And so, we have this network that’s able to treat the patients that are diagnosed. And now, while the centers that are doing the neurodiagnostic testing, they’re in need of workers and they’re in need of technicians and students and things like that. And we’re providing all of those things to them, so that it is truly a turnkey process.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
Not to kind of double over on what Joe talked about in his episode, but really those sites are provided with every single component of how to make that business successful. And like you said, this is just one more part of it. And it’s really, really cool to see how a business like this does embrace ideas like that and take it, and use those ideas to the fullest potential.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
I don’t know if you know, but when I was a resident, we created a podcast, actually. We had our student podcast.
Dave Kemp:
I did not know that. I did not know that.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
It was called Turning Heads. Kind of a play on the canal of repositioning maneuvers. But it was a resident podcast made by students for students. And we essentially were trying to be the mouthpiece of the next generation and letting them know that vestibular science is very, very interesting. It’s very fulfilling. It’s very profitable. A lot of what audiology, the hearsay, and what deters a lot of people from going into this specialty is that, you can’t make a living just doing vestibular testing. You need to also at least sell hearing aids. And if that’s the case, then why not sell hearing aids the entire time. And I think that, as I may have said before, we’ve proved that time and time again with our Centers of Specialty Care and with their success.
Dave Kemp:
Yeah. I had no idea that you had a podcast. That’s so cool. How many episodes did you guys end up doing?
Christina Coppola, AuD:
So there was three. What happened was the pandemic obviously put us all in, you know, it was difficult to get recordings from a distance and kind of piece them together. Especially while some of us were in clinic and some of us were at home. Also, just the nature of the pandemic, different people got COVID at different times. And then also the CSCs were really taking off during that time. So we got pulled more and more into those responsibilities, and it was a really difficult process. I mean, kudos to you for having the podcast, the editing process and all that was just… man.
Dave Kemp:
It’s a little bit more than meets the eye.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
Yeah. It’s daunting. I wish there was a CSC for podcast making.
Dave Kemp:
So, I’ve had people say to me before, you seem so optimistic about this whole industry and stuff, and it kind of conflicts with some of the narratives that are peddled that are a lot more doom and gloom. And I am an optimistic person just by nature, but a large part of my optimism is actually derived by the fact that I’ve met so many people over the last few years, that are telling me things that you don’t really hear, unless you’re kind of like actually boots on the ground and you’re hearing this stuff at the ground level. And I just think, the thing I love so much about AIB is that it’s full of young people. And I think that, if anyone has, like, for some of these people that have been in the industry for a while, they actually might have an exit plan. So, if you’re just entering into this, you got a lot on the line here and there’s a lot at stake. And so, to hear you, and just all the others that I’ve met over there, share your optimism for this space. And this embrace of like thinking differently is so exciting and encouraging.
Dave Kemp:
And so, I’m just curious, I’ve met a lot of the core AIB people, but with Match Me and all that, how has this gone so far, and what’s kind of been the response of some of these young professionals that are just entering into the industry. I mean, is this being well received? Are they looking at this and are excited about, hey, I didn’t really even learn this stuff that much within my graduate program, but now I’m learning more and I’m realizing that I really want this to be a focus of how I build up my own skillset within this profession. I mean, what’s kind of been your overall, the reception toward this from the students?
Christina Coppola, AuD:
Yeah, no, that’s actually a really good question. I’m glad you asked that. So really, I think the initial response to kind of hearing about the Match Me program is what students hear in their brain is, hey, oh my gosh, I can apply to this one person, and my application can essentially, if I had no quarrels with living situation, or clinical preferences. It could be blasted to 70 different sites or however many different sites choose to participate in this. And so, it takes a lot of the load off of the student and that work, that anxiety when you are applying to different externships. Where do I apply? What’s a good program? Because we’re able to kind of speak for that student, and also speak for that practice, and try and match a really good fit.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
But essentially, I mean, it’s a no brainer to me. If I was a student, I would definitely apply to the Match Me program, as well as AIB’s program. Because it’s just, to be honest, a really, really great opportunity for them. And back to your point about like, kind of what their thought process is with that, is a lot of the students who do get onto the interview with me, and we’re talking about what their goals are and what we’re looking for. There’s a lot of fear in some students that, am I making a mistake jumping into vestib? Am I going to be left out of the loop, as far as hearing if this doesn’t work out? And those are some of the concerns, and I always address them like, hey, to be completely honest, if you’re going to get a specialty education or a vestibular education, you do it in your younger years. No, these opportunities are not available for clinicians who have been in the field for many years. It’s either you come into it with that background or you don’t.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
On the other side of things, you went to school for audiology, you learned 99% of your courses were about hearing. And there’s so many different opportunities, so many different places where you can work, and you can gain that knowledge, not to mention the fact that there’s obviously new technology coming out every year. So it’s almost like even the devices four years ago can be obsoleted at times. So you’re having to relearn them anyways. So, those are kind of my words of encouragement to the student and they usually receive that really well. And especially, when I talk about how AIB has adopted a very medical kind of perspective on things, we really do believe in interprofessional collaboration. And we often are on the phone with neurologists, with primary care physicians, ENTs, to kind of educate those facilitators on what we’re doing and what we’re seeing, and what we see within the research. And at the same time gain their insight. It’s one of the reasons why we’re at all of these other conferences that aren’t audiology based. We were just at the American Academy of Neurology. We go to conferences all over the world in many different professions. So that we can advocate for our own profession and for the utility that we can provide the greater healthcare space.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
So really, knowing that, and then also having multidisciplines within house, we have an ENT on staff, we have physical therapy, we have audiology. And so, we’re involved in patient care. We get to see kind of both sides of things all the way from diagnostic to treatment. We see that patient, we fully evaluate them neurodiagnostically, and then we’re able to come up with a plan for them. And we’re also able to shadow those appointments with physical therapy on their journey to recovery.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
So knowing what those appointments involve and demand from that patient is honestly just one of the most important things you can be discussing during your consultation with that patient. Because I’ve seen patients, it is truly night and day. If you see a patient who has been primed, and prepped, and teed up for physical therapy, versus somebody who they know they’re going to vestibular therapy or balance therapy, but they don’t really know what it involves. They think, oh, I’m going to go into this therapy and I’m going to get better after six weeks or after a couple visits with them. And simply, that’s kind of like thinking that you can go to the dentist and just get a teeth cleaning every six months and your teeth are clean. No, you have to understand that you have to do the work at home. You have to brush every day, floss every day.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
And so, being able to prep and prime that patient at the diagnostic stage that, hey, there’s research and treatments that are very effective for you. You can absolutely overcome this, but it’s going to take some dedication. There’s going to be in-person physical therapy sessions, but a lot of the work is done at home. And so, priming those patients, it makes all the difference. And it’s one of the reasons why we always love to reach over across the aisle to other professions and kind of see their perspective, their treatment, how they feel about our testing, and we’re able to kind of mutually educate each other. So that’s a huge, huge, I think, also just a glaring gap in audiology is just the lack of interprofessionalism. I feel that a lot of times audiologists are afraid to go outside of their scope, or even entertain the idea of discussing something outside of their scope. So, we’re here to kind of change that and be the leaders IN bridging the gap between us and other fields.
Dave Kemp:
I love what you said too, about how if you’re young, get this experience now because you have it for life then. And you can get all the other stuff later, but having some level of specialized expertise within your field is just going to pay dividends down the line. So again, I would just encourage young people listening, it doesn’t necessarily have to be going the vestibular route, but I would think about that in terms of how can you differentiate yourself for life? I think that one way to do that is have a level of specialization in something. Knowing that the general knowledge will come with time. You’re just going to be exposed to that naturally.
Dave Kemp:
So you had mentioned, you have, I guess kind of walk me through what happens when you’d get accepted, you’re part of the Match Me program. You said that it starts with this week long boot camp down in Tampa at AIB. What happens from there? What’s this boot camp, and then where do you go from there? Do you immediately get placed? Or how does that work?
Christina Coppola, AuD:
Yeah, so it’s really depending on the site. So our boot camp is a week long and it just basically preps the patient to go into that externship with some background knowledge. We don’t expect everyone to have the highest level of education as far as vestib, because we all know that we only took one or two courses on it. So, it’s essentially just giving them all of the background knowledge that they’re going to need to understand, not only how to treat patients, how to evaluate them, but also how to interpret all of those results.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
So once they leave here, they have the tools to be a fully sufficient clinical vestibular, at least technician to begin with. So they will know how to run the tests, and then everything beyond that will be kind of a distance mentorship on how to interpret them and the different treatments and things like that. So once they go back to their site, which is dependent on when the site would like the student, but typically students can start anywhere from May to July, and then they will spend, it’s actually, depending on the university’s requirements for graduation, how long they have to be there, is it exactly a year? Or is it a certain number of clinical hours? So all of that is completely individualized for the student’s needs, but yeah, that’s in a nutshell, that’s essentially the process.
Dave Kemp:
And then on the flip side with the CSCs, how does this come to be where you basically indicate, I guess, to you all, hey, I want to be a part of this. I’m looking for help. How does that work?
Christina Coppola, AuD:
Yep. So we’ve reached out to them and asked if they would like to participate, and they fill out a quick survey based on, or with questions that are geared towards what they would be able to offer a student, what they’re looking for, how many students for how long, X, Y, Z. So I take both of those survey informations, one from the student and one from the practice site, analyze that, and then make best fits. And then essentially share the full application, which includes like letters of recommendation, resume, all of that is an application requirement, and I send that to all of the sites. I also, in the meantime, have interviews with the students and kind of get a feel for what’s a good fit for them, what they’re looking for in a fourth year residency or externship experience. And then I’m able to then promote them to those sites.
Dave Kemp:
That makes sense. So, I guess, the way I’m thinking about this is just that, for the CSCs, how long has Match Me existed? Is this pretty brand new?
Christina Coppola, AuD:
So, yeah, it’s pretty much in its infancy. Last year, the way that it came to be was essentially last year, we had so many really, really great applicants. So AIB gets around 70 applicants a year for our residency. We are known as the mecca of dizziness and balance. So everyone who wants to be within that specialty wants to come here. So we get a lot of applicants. Unfortunately, we’re not able to take very many of them. We only can take a handful from three to five students per year, depending on the space that we have that year. So we end up with all these really, really great, optimistic, smart students, really wanting a background in vestib. And at the same time, it was just coming to be that the CSCs were growing just immensely. It seemed like every month we were signing on a few different practices, and they all had this kind of concern of who’s going to be able to see patients, because you start slow, you start with what you can handle. And then as quickly as you’re ready to increase your patient load, we allow that, and we support that in different ways. We get people in the door when you’re ready to have them in the door.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
So, a lot of these practices pretty quickly end up with full schedules of dizzy and imbalanced patients. So, they quickly realize this. They’re almost victims of their own success. Yeah, exactly. And so, this at the same time was occurring, and I just really thought that it was an obvious option. Well, these students could fulfill these needs for these practices. These practices could fulfill these needs for these students. And so, that’s kind of where the Match Me came to be. And it was only last year we didn’t even have a process in place. We started suggesting students to certain sites that we really felt strongly for, but couldn’t necessarily take. And yeah, it turned out that a lot of sites really wanted students and a lot of students ended up going to those sites.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
So, yeah, basically, as I was saying, the AIB just allows, it has this environment that allows you to kind of it’s, they support all of your ideas and so that you can bring them to fruition. And it’s allowed me to kind of mold this match me program into something that it wasn’t last year. It’s, like I said, in its infancy. And I can foresee in the next year that it will be entirely different than it is this year. It’s only going to grow and mature as our programs also grow and mature. And I even predict that this may go beyond graduation for students, and we may actually start having job opportunities for new professionals within the space of audiology. So if you are a new professional and you are thinking about furthering your specialty within vestibular science, and assessment, and management, or neurodiagnostic assessment and management, absolutely don’t hesitate to reach out. I think that over the last 30 years it’s been known that AIB typically hires their residents. We think of our one year with the practice in externship as kind of like a training year. And so, that when you come and you graduate, you’re fully hireable.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
And so, AIB’s been very, very known to hire all new residents. But I do think that as we expand, there’s other job opportunities for people coming from outside AIB to be involved in at least some of the things that we’re doing. So I think that that’s on the horizon and that’s something really, really exciting to look forward to.
Dave Kemp:
Yeah. I was going to ask, kind of part of the original question was, I didn’t know if this had been around long enough to where you had been able to see if anyone had actually been brought on full time as like as a hire, beyond just being an extern. And I do agree with you, it seems like that’s kind of the trajectory you’re heading toward.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
Yeah. Yes. People have absolutely been hired on, even just in the last year. From the infancy of Match Me, but I do think that people who weren’t even associated with CSCs in the future could contact AIB and have potential job opportunities somewhere in the field.
Dave Kemp:
Yeah. Well, this has been such a great chat, Christina. Where can people connect with you, learn more about this, potentially even pursue the Match Me program and just get linked up, I guess, a little bit more with the AIB.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
Absolutely. So I think the best way is probably through email. My email is C-dot-C-O-P-P-O-L-A @dizzy.com. And I think that in order to direct someone in the right kind of flow of things or pathway, I need some background information. So a really good initial conversation I think can lead to further instructions or further references to where you could go.
Dave Kemp:
Fantastic. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for everybody who tuned in here to the end, and we will chat with you next time.
Christina Coppola, AuD:
Awesome. Thank you.
