Mary E. Smith Go Big Red Scholarship

The Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders is establishing a scholarship in honor of Professor Mary Smith to support graduate students in the Communicative Sciences and Disorders department, focusing on speech-language pathology, with an expressed specialty preference for diagnostics and assessment. When Claude Monet finished his series of Haystack paintings, he reportedly remarked it was a paradox to have travelled far and wide, only to realize what mattered to him most was in his backyard all along: capturing the transient beauty of light. For Mary Smith, what was important was always close to home. She grew up in Madison on Rugby Row, the only child of Margaret and Emmett Smith. Mary attended Blessed Sacrament Elementary School, West High School where she recently served on the 50th Reunion Planning Committee, and UW-Madison as an undergraduate. She received her MS Degree in Speech Pathology from Northwestern University. After positions in a Chicago suburbs and Milwaukee, Mary returned to UW-Madison’s Department of Communicative Sciences Disorders, where she delighted in work for 44 years on the clinical faculty. In her position, Mary Smith supervised graduate clinicians serving:
- children in the University Preschool Lab,
- children adopted from Eastern Russia and Romania into WI families in diagnostic clinics to document the children’s language and literacy development, and
- college students requesting accommodations for possible learning disabilities via multi-disciplinary team assessments.

In recent decades, Mary was the UW Speech and Hearing Clinic coordinator. She also advised undergraduates pursuing a major in our discipline in hopes of becoming speech-language pathologists or audiologists. Mary’s father was nicknamed Red owing to his hair color. Mary inherited that trait! She remembers her father as the person who instilled in her the value of education. It is a value she realized for herself and cultivated in her students and clients in her career as a Clinical Professor. She was — and is — a consummate encouraging listener. In appreciation for her commitment to teaching, scholarship and service efforts, and in gratitude for her collegial attitude, we are establishing the Mary E. Smith Go Big Red Scholarship. Each academic year, money from this scholarship will be awarded to a graduate student with an expressed specialty preference for diagnostics and assessment. We hope the title of the award will have special meaning to Mary, broad appeal to Badger alumni, and that others will contribute to the scholarship so that Mary’s legacy will carry forward as a Lasting Impression for many years to come. Her friends in the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders extend sincere gratitude for Mary’s life work making our work life shine!