Hi! My name is Caroline Allred and I am a senior at ASU. I am majoring in Speech and Hearing Science and plan on continuing my education by getting a Master’s degree in Communicative Disorders. I am the mom of three awesome kids. My two oldest children are 22 and 23 and they both attend college, as well. In fact, 2011 should be an exciting year for my family as my sons and I will all be graduating with our Bachelor’s degrees at different times throughout the year! My oldest son lives in Utah where he is majoring in Outdoor Recreation Management while my other son lives here in Tempe and is majoring in Sociology. I am also the mom to a beautiful five-year old little girl. She is awesome! This has been an exciting time for her as she finally started kindergarten last week. When we’re not doing school “stuff”, my daughter and I love to hike, play games, ride bikes, plan for the holidays, hang out with family and just cuddle.

I recently started working for the Arizona Department of Health Birth Defects Monitoring Program/CDC this past summer. This has been a new experience for me and I absolutely love it. In my job, I am responsible for gathering data on all babies that have been born with birth defects or that have birth defects that were diagnosed within the first year of life throughout the entire state of Arizona. I also get to work closely with the state epidemiologist to analyze the data that I collect and identify trends and outcomes. It is extremely interesting and I am learning a great deal each and every day.

I am very excited to be here and am looking forward to getting to know all of you over the semester!