Former TCU students help people find their voice

Fort Worth, TX

5/7/2010

By Whitney Williams, Schieffer School of Journalism

If you’ve ever wanted to be a broadcast reporter, articulate well in an interview or even speak louder but feel that your voice is holding you back-- you’ve got to see TCU alumni Kimberly Coker and Shelby Diviney.

In 1998 Coker packed her bags after working as a speech pathologist at the world-renowned Vanderbilt Voice Center, a job she landed after graduate school at Vanderbilt. She set her sights on providing a similar voice center for her college town of Fort Worth where she had studied speech pathology at TCU. After dozens of phone calls to hospitals and physicians throughout the metroplex, Baylor All Saints Hospital gave Coker a chance. The hospital offered Coker a temporary position under the condition that she only had six months to make something happen. And she did.

Baylor All Saints already had two of its own speech pathologists on staff but Coker wanted to offer her skills to different types of patients than the ones the specialists were seeing.

Coker realized Fort Worth needed voice rehabilitation and during her six months at Baylor she established herself. She began work on a voice center while reaching out to patients.

In 2003, Coker saw the establishment of the first voice center in Fort Worth, the D. Wayne Tidwell Voice, Speech and Swallowing Center. The founding of the new center put a name to the care that Coker had been providing the Fort Worth area for the five previous years. Coker used her center to offer internships to students interested in learning about the voice side of speech pathology. Shelby Diviney was one of those interns.

After graduating from Abilene Christian University in 2003, Diviney decided to attend TCU to receive her master’s in communication sciences and disorders.

Diviney said, “At TCU I took a voice class and the whole medical side of speech pathology piqued my interest.”

A professor encouraged Diviney to intern at the D. Wayne Tidwell Voice, Speech and Swallowing Center. Diviney interned for the last two semesters of graduate school and was offered a job. Diviney has been at the voice center since.

Coker, Diviney and one other speech pathologist have more than 3,000 visits per year at the center. Patients range from individuals with head and neck cancer to college seniors who want their voices to sound better for interviews, to sales people, to professional singers and anyone with voice issues in between.

Coker said, “We want to infiltrate Fort Worth and the surrounding area and become part of the national voice network where people know that this is a center that provides the top notch voice care you can receive.”