McManus
Answering the Call
Hilary McManus ’15
Communications Sciences and Disorders
College of Health Professions
New York City Campus
Some students come to Pace University and embrace all that it has to offer, eventually finding the inspiration that leads them to a career. Hilary McManus ’15, however, came in knowing exactly what she wanted to be: A pediatric audiologist. How she came to that decision is a story in itself.
“I didn’t even know what audiology was until 10th grade, when my cousin was born. They did the newborn hearing screening on her, and we found out that she was profoundly deaf in both ears. I’m close with her mother, so I went with them to the doctor’s appointments, and I saw the journey from just finding out that she was deaf to having bilateral cochlear implants, to growing up to where she is now—in mainstream third grade,” McManus says. Being so close to the experience underscored the importance of pediatric audiology in her mind, and when she came to Pace, she pursued classes in that vein.
One of her first classes as a freshman was taught by Abbey Berg, PhD, who was herself a pediatric audiologist and paved the way for McManus’s first internship. “I introduced myself to her to her after class and said, ‘I really want to be a pediatric audiologist.’ Then she said, ‘Great. I’ve got a job for you.’” A few months later, a position opened up for McManus at the New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, in their newborn hearing screening department. She’s been working with the hospital and with Berg ever since.
Most recently, McManus has collaborated with Berg for her honors thesis on the hearing aid effect in children. The study is a follow-up to a similar study in the 70s, which measured the visual and mental associations participants had of boys with hearing aids. The original study showed that boys with hearing aids scored lower in perceptions of intelligence, attractiveness, achievement, and personality. McManus and Berg are redoing the study and widening the scope to include boys and girls of all races and a variety of newer hearing-aid technologies to see if any perceptions have changed. McManus says she’s confident her research strengthened her application for the CUNY Graduate Center’s audiology program, to which she was accepted.
In addition to her work with Berg and the New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, McManus has also interned with New Frontiers in Learning, where she helped create a resource manual for students with learning disabilities, autism spectrum disorders, and related learning differences that outlined basic social skills and academic skills that would help them succeed—from proper email etiquette to appropriately speaking with professors to paper outlines and scheduling. “I like that my internships are related to my career and that I’ll have work experience in the field I’m entering. It’s also helped me learn more about the field in general, how to work in a team, see specific cases, and learn more about the medical field as a whole,” she says.
Aside from her own work, she gives a great deal of credit to Pace for her success. “I would not have anything—I would not have my job at New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, I wouldn’t have gotten into the Graduate Center—if not for Pace.”

Hilary
McManus
Hilary McManus ’15 shares her story of inspiration, her academic successes, and how Pace helped her on her journey to become a pediatric audiologist.
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