Sometimes the Cookie Crumbles by London

Sometimes the Cookie Crumbles by London - August 2026 Scholarship Essay

During my first year of graduate school, I was working with a four-year-old client on feeding therapy. Our sessions were not going well. My supervisor gave me feedback that has stayed with me since: I needed to find a way to make our time together more engaging, because right now we were falling flat. My young client would spend most of our sessions asking to go home, bored or slipping into a sour mood. He was essentially just sitting in his wheelchair while we observed him eating. I could tell we weren't connecting, and something needed to change.

At first, the feedback stung. I had prepared for our sessions, I had a plan, and I genuinely wanted to help this child. But I also knew I had room to grow as a Speech-Language Pathologist. So I came up with a new approach: build my therapy around his interests and his age, making our time together more playful and fun while still hitting our clinical targets. The problem hadn't been my therapy plan itself. It was that the plan wasn't specialized to him.

I started by simply reflecting on our time together: the toys he brought with him, the interests his mom had mentioned, the age-appropriate games I could work in. I prepared materials featuring some of his favorite characters, then brought them to my instructor for feedback, using her guidance to sharpen the ideas I already had. Slowly, I began weaving that information into our sessions, translating evidence-based feeding techniques into the language of play he already understood and loved.

One of his favorite characters was Cookie Monster, so I brought a puppet into our sessions and had Cookie Monster "eat" the food first before it was my client's turn. We took turns back and forth, Cookie Monster and then him, until the food on his plate was gone. What had once felt like a stressful demand suddenly felt like a game he got to play alongside a character he loved.

The shift was immediate. Sessions that used to feel like a negotiation became something he and I both looked forward to. He was more willing to try new feeding skills because we were working through play he actually cared about. His mother noticed the difference too. She told me he started asking to do the same "games" while eating at home. It seemed like a weight had lifted off her shoulders as she watched her son participate more fully in the therapy she devotedly brought him to every week, and she found she could connect with him more easily through the same activities we used in session. Everyone involved felt a renewed sense of momentum. Because the techniques were built around things he already loved, his mom was able to carry them into his everyday routine, helping him generalize the skills we practiced in therapy to both home and school.

Looking back, that feedback taught me something that has shaped how I approach learning ever since: growth rarely comes from being told I did something well. It comes from being told, clearly and specifically, what isn't working yet, and then having the humility to actually change course. It would have been easy to hear that feedback and make small, surface-level adjustments while keeping my original approach mostly intact. Instead, I let it push me to rethink my role entirely: from someone delivering a treatment plan, to someone building a relationship the treatment could live inside of.

That lesson has followed me into every stage of my training since. When I receive feedback now, I try to ask not just "how do I fix this specific thing," but "what does this feedback reveal about how I'm thinking about the work more broadly?" That first-year moment also taught me that creativity and clinical skill aren't separate things. Some of the most effective interventions come from genuinely knowing the person in front of you, not just the technique.

I still think about that four-year-old and his mother sometimes. They didn't just teach me how to run a better session. They taught me that feedback, even when it's hard to hear, is often the clearest map available for how to grow, and that the willingness to actually follow it is what turns a moment of struggle into the foundation for something better.