By: Maggie Coughlin
I’m an atypical student. I mean that two ways. First, I’m almost 49 and I’m attending Eastern New Mexico University in pursuit of my third master’s. In addition, while I earned an AA at 20, I didn’t finish my BS till my late 30s. Apparently, racking up degrees is just what I do now. I also teach English and introduction to humanities at a very small occupational college in rural Georgia, so I’m both a teacher and a student at the same time.
I’m also autistic. Please note that, like most adults on the spectrum, I use identity-first language (autistic person) as opposed to person-first language (person with autism) intentionally. But no matter how you choose to word it, autism is part of my daily life. My original diagnosis, more than 20 years ago, was Asperger’s Syndrome. My updated diagnosis, delivered this past spring, is Autism Spectrum Disorder, Level II, requiring support but without accompanying intellectual impairment or language delay. “Requiring support” is the relevant part here.
When I started teaching college two years ago, I was surprised by how few students were willing to work with our special populations coordinator, the person at my teaching institution responsible for helping students receive course adjustments such as extra time on quizzes, accommodations for physical disabilities, etc. As I discovered and am writing about elsewhere, there are a host of reasons, ranging from lack of awareness to mental and physical barriers, why students don’t seek accommodations. Today, though, I want to tell you why you should.
Let me be very frank from the get-go: you may well be offered accommodations that don’t help you and you may also not receive accommodations that would make a real difference. This is a well-known issue, and it’s one many disability and neurodiversity advocates are working hard to improve, but, in the meantime, it’s a legitimate frustration – and one of the biggest reasons students don’t pursue their options. If there’s a chance the accommodations won’t help, why put yourself through the process?
The obvious reason, of course, is that the accommodations might very well help you do better work with less stress – even if you don’t initially think they will. ENMU is a good place to try it because the application process is incredibly quick, simple, and painless compared to other institutions at which I’ve studied and taught. But applying for accommodations can bring you other benefits as well, ones most people never even consider. Here are a few:
- Gaining a deeper understanding of what you need and how your condition works
Students often don’t seek out accommodations because they don’t know what’s possible and aren’t even quite sure what they need. This is typically truer for those of us with invisible conditions than those who need, say, texts that can be scanned and read aloud by devices for people with sight loss. The effects of invisible conditions like autism, ADHD, anxiety, many autoimmune disorders, etc. are often underestimated and poorly understood – even by those of us who live with them.
If you’re going to live your best life, you need to understand yourself well. That applies to everyone, regardless of ability, but it applies to those of us who live with extra barriers even more. One of the most important things we can do for ourselves is to learn – continuously and as thoroughly as possible – how our particular condition works, how it affects our thinking and learning and physical functioning, and what different or extra things we need to function at our best.
The accommodations you receive the first time (or those you’ve received in the past) might not be what you need – or at least not all of what you need. They are, however, a great place to start. Try them out. See what works and what doesn’t. Let the experience lead you into thinking about what might work better instead. College is intended to be a place of learning and exploring. What better topic to explore here than you?
- Redefining your definition of self-reliance
Our culture has established and constantly reinforces wildly unhealthy ideas and norms about self-reliance. The prevailing myth holds that, if you are good and worthy, you’ll be able to succeed as long as you work hard enough. If you aren’t successful, you aren’t trying.
That’s rubbish.
Being human doesn’t work that way and it never has. The dysfunctional corollary to the “try harder” myth is the idea that asking for help is a sign of weakness. This, too, is rubbish.
Self-knowledge is strength. Honesty is strength. The ability to identify and make use of resources is strength. The most effective leaders in the world know this. They engage regularly in honest self-reflection and then find the people, techniques, and tools that can support their areas of need. Asking for help allows a leader to focus, get more done, and, ultimately, help more people. By the same token, if you go hang out in the anthropology and history departments for a while, you’ll discover that assistive technologies and strategies are nothing new – and that the societies in which the greatest number of people survive and thrive are the ones in which cooperation and collaboration are the norm. If asking for help has historically worked for business moguls, tech tycoons, and the actual Neanderthals (or, at least, the Cro-Magnons), why wouldn’t it work for you and me as well?
Everyone who reached their full potential needs help with something. Learning to ask for it is a mark of maturity, a sign of self-confidence. Start asking now.
- Assisting in education and destigmatization
Remember when I said you may receive accommodations that don’t help, but not receive ones that would? This happens, in part, because the people in charge of determining adjustments need feedback from us – and often don’t get it. Many of those professionals don’t actually live with a condition that requires extra assistance. Even when they do, they live with their specific conditions, not the full range of conditions that their departments are trying to support. Those of us living with various conditions need to help educate people about how to help us. How else can they possibly know what works and what doesn’t?
If more of us apply for adjustments and then circle back to report on how they helped us (or didn’t) and what else we might need, the services and accommodations will continue to become more helpful and more effective. As they become more helpful, more people will use them. People who could not succeed in college without assistance will succeed and people who never would have tried will begin trying. When we, the people most impacted by disabilities and neurodiversity, actively participate in the systems intended to help us, the system gets better.
Along the way, people start talking more and more openly about disability and neurodiversity. That increases awareness and decreases stigmas, which opens up opportunities on a host of fronts from employment to housing to health services outside the college experience. When you seek accommodations, you’re doing all of us a favor and you’re helping create a better future, not only for yourself, but for others who might otherwise struggle alone in frustration. You have the power to leave it better than you found it. Please do.
This all sounds lovely in theory, doesn’t it? In reality, asking for accommodations is still an act of bravery. Mentally, it can be really tough to overcome those ingrained ideas about self-reliance – and the fear of rejection and concerns about whether taking the step will even be worthwhile.
I get it. I do. I’ve been there. I’m urging you to do it anyway.
You’ve invested in college already, so shouldn’t you invest in getting the most out of it? More importantly, seeking help is an investment in your personal and professional growth. And you are the best investment you’ll ever make.
Author’s note to leadership, faculty, and accessibility staff everywhere: when we ask, respond well. That part’s on you.
