She sojourned from English literature to Communication Disorders. From FSU to Oxford University to Africa and back to FSU. From a summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa fluency with language to a profound communication seclusion penetrated only by gestures and monosyllables- and thus to a profound lesson. After Mollie Friedman’s Peace Corps service in the Cameroon, when “for a very long time” she had no one to converse with, “I did not forget that experience of communicative isolation, of feeling trapped and unknown.” It must be, she thought, what life is like with a communication disorder.

Friedman, who has won a prestigious $18,000 University Fellowship, knew the Peace Corps “would alter my life forever”. She abandoned plans for a literature PhD, because “I needed to contribute something else”. In Africa she taught health education in a tiny village and a school for the deaf. Fluent French did not help with local languages until she found translators.

Friedman’s own linguistic isolation and that of the deaf children (“I felt more comfortable with those amazing kids”) pointed her to Comm Dis for graduate school. “I do my best to maintain the reality of my Peace Corps experience, which brimmed with both the painful and the happy. And sometimes, it is the painful parts that really matter.” Sometimes, too, pain produces happier realities- as Mollie Friedman will do for others in her career.