Episode 183 features Emily Anderson, who hails from Anchorage, Alaska. Emily is 27 years old and just recently started the first ever NSA Family Chapter in Alaska.

Emily works as an environmental technician doing water sampling and monitors contaminated water sites. She also does outreach with native Alaskan tribes. Emily also has a second job as a server at a steak house restaurant.

Emily shared an interesting phenomena about her stuttering. It actually works to her advantage when speaking one on one with tribal residents. In Alaska, it is custom and tradition to speak slowly and take long pauses, so it works perfectly with her stuttering!

Listen in as we discuss Emily’s impressions of her first NSA conference. She shares that she thought it wasn’t going to live up to the hype she had heard about. Well, she was proven wrong! She talks about the comfort she found being in a judgement free zone where other people had the same weird insecurities she has had.

We talk about workplace stuttering and how she manages in both jobs she has that require a lot of communication. Her favorite workshop was the one on stuttering in the workplace, where she heard the stories of people who have not let stuttering limit their career goals. We even talk about how cool it was that in that workshop she met a real rocket scientist who happens to stutter.

And we talk about the fact that Emily’s mom has been a SLP for 40 years and was the perfect role model for Emily growing up. Mom is so proud that Emily decided to go to her first conference and is actually thinking about going herself next year.

Emily has written a couple of articles about stuttering for The Mighty. Here is the links to two of them.

Finding My Confidence Working In Food Service With A Stutter

When Stuttering Makes Me An Extrovert Stuck In An Introvert’s Body

The music used in today’s episode is credited to ccMixter.