Be a scholar

Above and beyond being "well read", as the August 27, 2017 post for this blog urges ; -
speech-language pathologists must have the constitution to link what they do in the treatment setting, to the grand body of cumulative knowledge on human communication, cognition and swallowing. You don't do that because you want a car on the professional ego train, or that you want to keep up the momentum you had in university for setting the curve. Some scholars can do both - climb the ladder of riches, while working as a clinician/researcher/academic. Basic and applied research in our fields, is regardless, THE reward if you seek to answer a scholarly question. Whether to understand the processes underlying behavior within the population, or to discover valid and reliable, real life solutions for impaired individuals -scholarly endeavor gives us clinicians the credibility we need, in the marketplace for human service.

This post will not teach you nearly enough fundamentals of scholarly research: there are literature reviews, books, convention presentations and courses, post-doctoral fellowships and master's level internships, already in place and accessible to all with interest and drive. There is quantitative research, where discrete data collection and rigorous statistical method allow you to establish proof of a phenomenon in human communication sciences. That school of thought is well represented by training programs such as - https://communication.northwestern.edu/departments/csd/research

Qualitative research will approach human communication phenomena from a largely descriptive perspective: "...a variety of analytic procedures designed to systematically collect and describe authentic, contextualized social phenomena with the goal of interpretive adequacy”. 

Damico, J. S., & Simmons-Mackie, N. N. (2003). Qualitative research and speech-language pathology: A tutorial for the clinical realm. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 12, 131–143.

An example of a training program that affords the budding researcher experience in qualitative research methods is -  http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~jsd6498/codi610/codi610page.html

 Regardless of your method, - you will have occasion to use both paradigms in the course of your career, - identifying and attacking a research problem using scholarship can light you up. It can ignite or revitalize your career. It can save the world! It will feel that good.