Hi, I was a speech therapist now a teacher (so switched in the opposite direction from many of you!)
I worked with adults and children. Completely different jobs in my opinion and I think they should be two different degrees. But you are trained to do both within the one degree.
Kids - I had a huge caseload. Long waiting lists. Frustrated families and schools. I got to spend maybe 2 sessions assessing their needs then wrote a plan for an assistant to deliver. Boring and frustrating that research and the evidence base was ignored and my session times and assessment hours were dictated by staffing levels. I was given two hours max to fully assess someone whether it was a child with complex needs or a child who simply had difficulty producing an /s/. Perhaps just a shoddy team I worked for but put me right off. So I went to work with adults.
Adults - half the week in acute hospital predominantly working with swallowing issues but sometimes communication difficulties after stroke. The other half of the week was doing home visits or clinics. Much more varied but far too generalist despite my role apparently being a B6 specialist. I was seeing people with vocal nodules one day, people with dementia the next, people with MND needing highly specialised assessments for alternative means of communication, transgender another day for voice therapy. Absolutely loathed it. Felt like guess work. We had to make big decisions on people's capacity to eat and drink safely based on feeling their throat and simply observing them eating and drinking. We had very limited access to instrumental swallow assessment equipment and there were so many gatekeepers to such procedures that it took too long. It felt like asking a physio to devise a rehab plan for someone with a sore leg despite that person never having had an xray to see if it was broken/damaged.
Left due to feeling like I was making no difference whatsoever. It was also a very disrespected AHP role among my other colleagues on the acute team.
Now a teacher and absolutely love it!
Word of advice - if you end up working with adults as a speech therapist, dysphagia (swallowing) will likely be about 90% of what you do. Ensure you work with a service where all patients can access instrumental assessments if it's in their best interests. i.e. you won't just be doing bedside swallow assessments for your whole career and needing to make a rehab plan based on whether or not you hear someone cough.
Honestly, the most soul destroying job I've ever had. I'd encourage you to go and shadow some speech therapists in different settings before applying to uni.
I did a 4 year undergrad. Applied as a mature student.