What makes a person decide to move into a completely different profession in life when they’ve already spent nearly 20 years in the workforce doing something else? Audiologist Anna Niemi had been working for a small business in Connecticut managing its finances while raising two young children with her husband when she began to feel that something was missing professionally. She enjoyed her work, but there was a desire to see an immediate benefit in peoples' lives that was not possible in her current field. According to Dr. Niemi, "this topic of conversation became so frequent in our household that my husband and I began talking about a return to higher education for me. The thought of returning to college again was both exciting and daunting. There was also the task of deciding exactly which profession to pursue."
Dr. Niemi's son was receiving speech services at the time and the immediate improvement in his communication ability sparked her interest in speech pathology and audiology. As she researched information about possible careers in the field of communication disorders, she completed an observation with an audiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital in 2011. "I was able to see how much of a positive, impactful effect I could have on a person’s life," she says. "Performing an audiological evaluation yielded information that could be used to appropriately diagnose a person's hearing loss and allow the audiologist to recommend the appropriate treatment." The part of audiology that most intrigued her was using the information obtained during a hearing exam to program a set of hearing devices. Dr. Niemi states, "These hearing aids, that were small enough to hold on the tip of your finger, helped vastly improve peoples' communication and quality of life! That day set my life on a new course."
For the last year of her four year doctoral program, Dr. Niemi began looking for a clinic to complete her year long residency under the mentorship of an audiologist. As she explored clinical placements at various facilities, one clinic stood out to her. "I had heard about Florence Hearing Health Care and Dr. Sowards from my classmates and professors," she explains, "Dr. Sowards' personal experience of wearing hearing aids since childhood and her reputation of providing hearing healthcare to her patients with no sales pressure was appealing." Dr. Niemi spent the last year of her clinical rotation working side by side with Dr. Sowards learning ways to diagnose and address different types of hearing loss. After completing her degree requirements she earned her Doctorate in Audiology from the University of Massachusetts and joined the team at Florence Hearing Health Care as a clinical audiologist seeing patients with hearing loss and tinnitus and fitting patients with all makes and models of hearing aids.