Amy Anderson '01 awarded Martin Dale '53 Fellowship

Thanks to a $25,000 grant from a Martin Dale '53 Fellowship, architecture major Amy Anderson '01 will spend next year serving an organization that helped her overcome a personal challenge — stuttering.

Her voice is scratchy from a sore throat, but is otherwise clear, fluid and articulate. One would never guess that at the age of 13, Anderson stuttered so severely she barely spoke.

Beginning when she was three years old, Anderson and her parents unsuccessfully tried almost 20 speech therapy programs before they found the Hollins Communications Research Institute in Roanoake, Va., an organization dedicated to stuttering research and therapy.

She participated in an intensive three-week residential program there that taught her to slow her speech down to two seconds per syllable, recognize the speech and breathing patterns and then rebuild her language patterns.

"By the end," she said, "I had taken the first step toward talking on a more permanent basis."

As she looked into post-graduation options, giving something back to the organization that changed her life seemed a natural choice.

"It's hard for me to put into words the impact that program had on my life, but it was absolutely huge," she said. "There were so many situations I wanted to participate in but couldn't because speech was so important to those activities. Friendship was a lot more fun, and school was a more positive experience. Instead of just taking in information, I was able to argue with people."

In her fellowship application, Anderson described the difficulties stutterers face. "We've all spent enough time balancing while walking on curbs; how much to lean in either direction in order to maintain progress. But for those who chronically stutter, the necessary avoidance isn't only a matter of deciding how much of oneself to express, but of functioning with a reduced set of speakable words. A syllable becomes expensive."

Architecture professor Beatriz Colomina commented in a letter supporting Anderson's fellowship application, "Her own experiences with [the Hollins Institute] have put her in a unique position to make a contribution . . . She has not only drawn great strength from overcoming her earlier impediments, but has used the experience to rethink a number of things that we take for granted. Time and time again she demonstrated a capacity to turn an issue around and reframe seemingly fixed questions."

Anderson will spend next year helping the Hollins Institute develop FluencyNet, a combination computer hardware and software product that records speech, presents feedback in the computer, and displays it so a person can view his progress.

After spending this summer developing her computer programming skills, Anderson plans to work with Hollins consultants to make the technology easier to incorporate into a person's life. "Taking a design mentality and applying it to technology can help with the client's perspective of [the program]," she said.

Graduates of the Hollins program retain their speech improvement only through regular practice. "The program is not intended to fix everything automatically," Anderson said. "You have to practice every day to keep performance at a high level."

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She said she practices weekly with two University students who are also Hollins alumni and returns to the institute every summer for an alumni weekend that "is a shot in the arm," she said.

FluencyNet will provide alumni an additional practice methodology that was previously only available during the course.

After completing her fellowship, Anderson is contemplating graduate studies. "I'm not sure on what scale I'll be applying these concepts," she said. "I might apply [human interaction] to the structural design of architecture, or stay on a smaller scale and focus on smaller designs."

Among her top choices are programs in human computer interaction at Stanford University and architecture programs at Columbia University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.