Alyssa's blog

Alyssa is a doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island. Follow them @yes_thattoo or check out their personal blog.

This is a post about humor – April Fools day was just this past Monday, after all. It's also a post about diversity, and one I've been mulling over for some time.

Have you ever been at a presentation where the presenter made a joke to lighten the mood? I have, several times. A classmate was discussing the methods section of a paper that used fruit flies, and she included a picture of some flying fruit. Very punny. Similarly, a couple weeks before I had the idea for this post (so months ago by now), I was at an engineering presentation and suddenly there were pictures of scantily clad models. I don't remember why. I don't remember what the talk was about. I remember being uncomfortable. I'm sure it was meant to be just a joke.

A lot of things that aren't exactly appropriate get passed off as “just a joke.” Showing who's part of a group and who's not is a function of humor. So yes, it's a joke, but is it ever “just” a joke?

Or have you ever wanted to lighten the mood as a teacher or presenter? I have. Humor can support audience engagement and lift our spirits. Sometimes a moment of laughter can provide a break in a content-heavy talk or ensure a key point sticks in peoples heads, and sometimes we'd like to show our audience (our whole audience) that we're all in this together. However, I don't use scantily clad pictures as my comic relief. I don't make my audience the butt of the joke, not the women in the audience, nor the people with whatever conditions I'm discussing in reference to my research. If I'm alienating my audience (or people who should be in my audience, but I'm not thinking about for reasons like institutional X-ism, whatever X may be in this case) with my jokes, I'm just not that good at comic relief.

With that said, I still like humor. I still like my jokes. What might I use?

Cat pictures. Yes, really. Not everyone likes cats, but cat pictures are a common meme at this point, and most will at least appreciate the memetic value when one shows up unexpectedly. For my psychology class last spring, I did a systematic review of work on P300 spellers (one method of controlling computers with brain signals for communication purposes) that included participants with disabilities. For people who are familiar with augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), P300 spellers are a sort of switch system: options are presented to users, who then select the option they want with a switch. It's just that the switch is an electrical signal from their brain based on an “unusual attended event.” Usually that means sticking the letters of the alphabet in rows and columns and then visually flashing the letters in rows and columns, but we do try other ways of creating an “unusual attended event” for the computer to read the switch signal from. One study used cat sounds. So I put a cat picture on the slide about auditory systems. People laughed, creating levity in a dense presentation.

I can use “Joking but not really” comments about known gaps or edges in the literature. In the same presentation, I said: "There are actual good reasons we usually start testing new ideas to improve these P300 spellers with participants without disabilities. The burden of research participation is one of them. But if the idea is to have people with neurological disabilities use your system based on recording neurological activity, you don't get to say it works until it works for people with those disabilities. Their disabilities kind of … directly affect the signals you're classifying."

This is an accurate description of why brain computer interface research tends to start with participants without disabilities, and then test successful refinements with participants with disabilities. It also got laughter and helped them remember this key point.

In a class presentation about AAC for speaking autistic adults, I wanted to explain how I’d chosen the topic. A systematic review of AAC research for autistic adolescents and adults found four participants over the age of 18. Telling people this indicates a massive gap in the literature I’d like to address is truthful. Telling people I've squeezed into a single dorm room for the night with more autistic adults who use AAC than they found in their systematic review is also truthful, but that version of the explanation makes people laugh.

I'm not certain what kind of humor to call this, but it works. People remember my explanations. Making things both memorable and understandable is part of presenting well. It's part of being a good teacher. Poking fun at your own subject (not your students, and definitely not your marginalized students or colleagues) can lighten the atmosphere and make things memorable. Just make sure it's not at the expense of your audience. In addition to the risk of telling listeners they aren't really part of your audience, but only window dressing, it's not good pedagogy. Keep in mind: I don't remember the content of the presentation with the pictures of models. I do remember the fruit flies.

(How) do you use humor in your teaching and presentations? What jokes do you appreciate as an audience member? What jokes alienate you?

[Image by Flickr user Working Word and used under a Creative Commons license.]

Alyssa is a doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island. Follow them @yes_thattoo or check out their personal blog.

“Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham
Phdcomics.com

This post is part of a (somewhat loose) series about being disabled at university, with a focus on graduate school: problems we encounter, how we deal with them, and what you can do that will make things easier for fellow graduate students with disabilities.

Setting up formal accommodations at university is often complicated. It requires diagnostic paperwork. It involves knowing which office handles your accommodations. Is it through Disability Services for Students? University Disability Services? Some other office with a similar name? It involves meetings every semester with the disability office, getting an accommodations letter, and often meetings with professors. It's no surprise to me that two thirds of college students with disabilities don't get accommodations because they just don't make it through this process. My own accommodations were delayed by not knowing how to get them.

The process gets trickier as a graduate student. My university’s disability services page for graduate students discusses academic accommodations, but their page about graduate assistants seems to assume we're working with disabled undergraduates, not that we're disabled graduate assistants. Do I still go through Disability Services for Students if I need accommodations as a teaching assistant? Do I go through human resources? Do I need to deal with both offices, or should I be going through some other office entirely? In my first year as a graduate assistant, my department didn't know. The graduate assistants union didn't know. Disability Services for Students didn't know. Nobody knew I handled my accommodations informally throughout my masters program. In our most recent contract, it’s been specified that we still use disability services for students—because I asked the union about it.

Even if it's quite a bit of work, it's reasonably clear how to get class accommodations as an undergraduate student at my university. It's reasonably clear how to get class accommodations as a graduate student, too. Getting accommodations as a graduate assistant, I (now) know who I’m supposed to talk to.

Arranging accommodations for my doctoral comprehensive exam was more complicated.

First, my accommodations are simple but unusual. I'm Autistic, and my ability to speak is highly variable. When speech isn't working (well enough), I use some alternative form of communication. I might write on a side board. I might type. I have a text-to-speech program on my laptop, and applications designed for communication support on my iPad. As a teacher, I've written answers to student questions on index cards and left the cards with them. I know I’m the first person at URI to have this accommodation and the one professor I sent my (old) accommodations letter to before our meeting wasn’t sure what “use of Text-to-Speech computer software as a tool for real-time class participation, as needed” meant in practice. So no matter the context, I’m giving extra explanations and possibly demonstrations of my communication devices.

Since I can and do use a variety of alternatives to speech, my best “alternative communication method for in-class participation” will depend on the context. For that reason, I'm now supposed to “consult with the course instructor to determine the most effective method on a course by course basis.” I asked for this change in accommodations wording, which I probably only got because I’m the first and only person at URI with this accommodation. I like my new wording, but it does create additional complications when trying to handle accommodations for my comprehensive exams. Who am I consulting with now? Nobody knows! Do I discuss this with my major professors? Do I convince my whole committee? Am I negotiating with the graduate school? I don't think most accommodation letters explicitly include this sort of negotiation, so there probably isn't a single answer.

I discussed what alternative to speech I would use in my oral comprehensive exams, if needed, with each member of my committee and several people from the graduate school office. I actually wound up talking to three different deans of the graduate school along with an enrollment services representative. In fairness, I talked to two of those deans because they’re also neuroscience faculty and I ran into them at a neuroscience event while sorting this out. Talking to the five members of my committee, the enrollment services representative to the graduate school, and merely one dean would probably have been sufficient. They all agreed that leaving my laptop screen projected to the room after my presentation finished, then typing to my committee on the projected screen, would be a reasonable accommodation for my oral exam. That's still a lot of people to talk to and time I otherwise could have spent preparing for the actual exams.

Then there's the question of where I'm sending my letter from disability services. When I'm taking a class, the letter goes to the professor teaching the class. Who does the letter go to for comprehensive exams? Does it go to my committee? Does it go to the graduate school office? Does it go to both my committee and the graduate school office? I didn't know. My major professors didn't know. My committee didn't know. The graduate school thought they wanted a copy, probably, but even they weren't certain. Just in case, I forwarded my accommodations letter to both my committee and the graduate school. I thought it was a bit funny to be sending the letter after negotiating my precise alternative communication method for the exam with eight different people, but better safe than sorry, right?

What gets to me, even more than how many different moving parts were involved in setting up my own accommodations, is that I'm still the lucky one. This adventure didn't involve any professors who argued that my accommodations weren't reasonable. It's not the same thing as accessibility, thanks to all the extra work involved, but I got my accommodations. No seemingly unrelated barriers popped up when I pointed out that my disability related needs could, for the first time, affect an exam.

As a postscript, I am happy to report that I passed my comprehensive exams. I also kept my ability to speak throughout, but as long as I’m set up to use AAC, I don’t care much how well speech is working. Some things that can knock speech out are problems for other reasons, like the sounds and lights of a passing emergency vehicle, but the purpose of my AAC is to ensure (non-)speech itself isn’t an issue. As far as I’m concerned, competence at anything, including teaching, presentations, and “oral” exams, means competence at it regardless of how well speech is working (or not working) at the time.

[Comic by Jorge Cham used in accordance with permissions found on the comic’s about page]

Alyssa is a doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island. Follow them @yes_thattoo or check out their personal blog.

I've been attending the dynamics seminar in my university's math department for a long time, and I kept attending after I joined the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program for doctoral study. The professor who organizes the seminar has been asking me to talk about dynamics in neuroscience ever since I started in the neuroscience program, too. Last semester, I finally did. On Halloween. (Yes, I presented in costume.)

The person in charge of our journal club expressed interest in that talk, so I sent him my slides. He asked me if I could give a talk using almost the same slides, just replacing the parts from a schizophrenia paper I'd previously presented on in journal club with a discussion of the pain paper I’d chosen to match the current semester’s topic. So, I thought about how to use the same slides to present to a different audience.

Since creating visual aids can be an important (and time consuming!) part of preparing for a presentation, being able to re-use what amounted to my visual outline was a major time-saver. It was also good practice at thinking about presenting interdisciplinary work to a potentially mixed audience. Since I’m in the interdisciplinary neuroscience program, I’m going to keep having to do that.

So, here's what I did:

Background
My background slides included a picture with four neuron configurations: multi-polar, bi-polar, psuedo-unipolar, and unipolar neurons. For the mathematicians, I explained how the geometry was highly variable and tended to be complicated. The neuroscientists already know this. However, the text of that slide relates to how many neurons different animals have. I told the neuroscientists how the increasing number of neurons and complexity of connections affects the practicality of modeling interactions.

Similarly, while the mathematicians got an explanation of how action potentials work, the neuroscientists got an explanation of why action potentials can be tricky to model. My explanation of what a dynamical system was didn't change — I made it for any neuroscientists who came to the math talk.

Modeling Neurons and their Interactions
Neither the mathematicians nor the neuroscientists are expected to be electrical engineers. Some people could read circuit diagrams and some people couldn't. A mathematician asked me, for example, if there was a circuits-based justification for replacing a neuron model that included many separate components with different capacitances and resistances with a single component to represent the whole neuron (I didn't, and do not, know the answer to that question). A neuroscientist, on the other hand, asked how these systems of equations led to different firing patterns.

Each of these audiences came with different backgrounds and interests--the neuroscientists with a desire to know if a given model will work and the mathematicians with an interest in how the properties of the model change with the parameters.Working together, they might try to reproduce neuronal firing patterns the model predicts near the transition between different firing patterns. That's what my pain paper was basically about, which I thought was very cool.

Final Thoughts
The content, explaining how dynamical systems apply in neuroscience, was similar in both talks. That's why leaving the slides alone worked. However, the emphasis was different, and the two groups had different background knowledge, which is something to consider when deciding whether or not to use the same slides for different talks. I had to give the neuroscientists, for example, more background information about the math so they could understand it, and I had to give the mathematicians more background information about neurons.

Oh, and I presented to the neuroscience group using Proloquo4Text, an iOS speech generating program. It's a skill I need to have since my ability to speak is highly variable, and it meant I had to make a script for a presentation for the first time ever.

[Photo of Alyssa taken during the Q&A of their second presentation.]

Alyssa is a doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island. Follow them @yes_thattoo or check out their personal blog.

As part of my discussions of disability in graduate school, I’ve talked about my mentorship network. Now it’s time to talk about one sticky point about mentoring that affects me (and probably a lot of other students): the intersection of authority and ill-fitting guidance. People who’ve never interacted with certain systems (disability systems come to mind for me) from the side of the person supposedly being served may not think about how scary this can be. It even took me a lot of thinking to figure out what the sticky point really was.

There are two realities at play here:

First, disabled people often run into trouble at the hands of people who think they have our best interests in mind. It’s happened to me. My year abroad in China almost got stopped before it started because of an administrator who thought (and said) autistic people didn’t belong at university. If asked, they’d say they had my best interests at heart, but when a person makes it into an advanced program, suggesting they can’t participate on the basis of a diagnosis is not supportive.

Second, mentors and advisors, basically by definition, know stuff we don’t know. That means they’re going to think of things (academic or not) we haven’t thought about. They may have ideas we initially think aren’t great, but that upon reflection, they were totally right about. They can also have ideas we initially think aren’t great, which, upon reflection, were a great idea for someone else but didn’t quite fit our needs. Figuring out which is which can take time and distance.

I need mentors who can guide me based on the second reality while being very careful of the effects of that first.

If you ask me to consider an idea I might not have thought about, I will. I can, in fact, take advice. Tell me a project I was thinking about is probably too big for a semester? I’ll narrow my focus, plan to do more work than a class normally requires, or accept that I won’t get through the whole thing in a semester. (I’ve done all three at different times.) Point out that an independent study project that involves lots of EEG recording might not play well with my sensory processing issues because of where the EEG lab is? I’ll choose a different project. Suggest that I use Google Scholar to quickly see what results I get on each of the topics I’m considering for my class project? I’ll do that. Only one topic gave me enough results to meet the class’s requirements, so I went with that one.

Unless you’re suggesting I do something I’m incapable of or basing your suggestion on an incorrect assessment of my priorities, I’m pretty likely to take your advice. Once, for example, I reviewed public writing on augmentative and alternative communication options for autistic adults with some speech because I knew there wasn’t much directly relevant work in the literature. The professor liked my idea, and she understood that the dearth of academic literature on the subject was exactly why I wanted to work on the topic. This understanding allowed her to give advice relevant to my actual priorities, and she appreciated my application of tangentially related work. However, this could very easily have gone differently.

Mentors don’t always know how to advice graduate students who don’t fit the mold for any reason, including disabled graduate students. They may assume their superior knowledge of their field means they also know more about our specific needs. When they make and enforce decisions for me, especially those related to those specific needs after I’d informed them of my own conclusions, I’m going to be scared. I might be mad, too, but the primary issue is that I am scared. True, I don’t really think an academic mentor will decide something terribly too drastic without my consent, like having me involuntarily committed (though something like that happened to a friend of mine). And I don’t really think someone who is already working with me will suddenly decide my diagnosis means I don’t belong in their class. However, people I haven’t worked with yet have done this.

Smaller decisions may not have anything to do with my diagnosis, or my other identities. Some do, and others don’t. But it almost doesn’t matter: making and enforcing a smaller call based on incorrect information or incorrect assumptions indicates a willingness to do so regardless of what the decision was. I have the same two options regardless: First, I can try to help them understand why that’s terrifying, hope they don’t do it again, and stay scared. Or second, I can ensure they never get the chance to do that again. Neither of these options are great for a mentor-mentee relationship. Is the mistake you hope to prevent worse than making your mentee fear you? If not, can a failure serve as your mentees teacher in this case? Can you warn your mentee about what might happen, and then let experience teach them?

[Image by Flickr user Jonathan, under a Creative Commons License.]

Alyssa is a doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island. Follow them @yes_thattoo or check out their personal blog.

Most people play more than one role. I'm a mathematician, a neuroscience student, a disability studies scholar, and a researcher in the areas of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) and brain computer interfaces. I'm also an Autistic person who uses AAC some of the time, and sometimes I write poetry.

These roles overlap, but not everything I do is relevant to all my roles. Somehow, I doubt that my having poetry in the second and third Spoon Knife anthologies (and a memoir in the first) is relevant to people deciding whether or not I'm qualified to teach number theory. They'll care that I've taught number theory before, though. Or, my being a teacher usually isn't relevant to my AAC work. Even when it is, it's not the connection most AAC professionals would expect. (As far as I know, I've never had a student who used AAC, but I use it as a teacher.)

So, how do I decide what to include in any given CV, resume, or introduction?

Depending on how much space you’re given, the answer could be everything. I have a nice LaTeXed version of my CV with everything, including my online writing for any venue outside my personal blog. It's five full pages, and they are dense. Applying for an academic position, I could use that. I could theoretically post it online, too, but I probably won’t. When there's a length limit on the CV or resume, which happens sometimes, I can't use that. When we're talking about a short bio to go with a chapter or a conference presentation, I really can't use it.

So, what gets to stay?

It depends.

If it's a teaching job, I need to keep my teaching experience. If I list every class I have taught or assisted and when I did, that's over a page on its own. If I reserve this sort of listing for classes where I was the instructor of record, I can (barely) get my education and teaching experience onto the first page. Online writing can probably go, and depending on what I'm hoping to teach, I might chop unrelated publications.

If it's a speaking gig, I need to keep my presentations, and I should probably keep all my face-to-face teaching. I might be able to chop the list of classes from my online teaching, though, and publications can be trimmed. I really only need the ones with topics related to the speaking gig. I’ll also move my presentations sections ahead of the publications sections.

If I'm trying to get a job writing online, I'll want the online writing to stay. Other publications would stick around if they fit and would get cut by topic relevance if there were space issues. My teaching experience would be cut to a bare minimum level of detail, unless I was trying to write about education. Goodbye, list of classes taught!

The field I'm currently looking at matters too. Overall, the idea is to keep the information that's most relevant to the people who'll be reading this iteration of my resume, or this version of my bio. Things can matter because the work was done in a similar environment, or because it's work on a similar topic, for a similar audience. For example:

For an online AAC conference, my bio read: Alyssa is an Autistic PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program at the University of Rhode Island. Among other areas, they study Augmentative and Alternative Communication, both in the form of brain computer interfaces and as used by autistic adults. Alyssa hosted a United States Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication chat (#ussaachat) on AAC in the workplace and uses AAC part time.

In this context, AAC work, of any kind, was most relevant. My current position as a graduate student stuck around, but my audience didn't need to know ahead of time that I'm a math teacher.

Whereas, as a math teacher at the Art of Problem Solving, my bio reads: Alyssa first joined AoPS as a grader in 2010. They have an MS in mathematics and are working towards a PhD in Interdisciplinary Neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island, doing work on brain computer interfaces. Previously, they studied mathematics, mechanical engineering, and Mandarin Chinese. Alyssa placed 6th at Massachusetts State Mathcounts in 2006, and participated in both the AMC and AIME for all four years of high school. In their spare time, Alyssa reads (and sometimes writes) science fiction and fantasy, plays ultimate, and makes geometric art.

Teaching students who may be preparing for math competitions like Mathcounts, the American Mathematics Competition (AMC), or the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) is about the only time my middle and high school participation in those competitions remains relevant. And as a math teacher, my highest degree in math is at least as relevant as the highest degree I have or am working towards, if these aren't the same.

Neither of these bios mention my work for Disability in Kidlit, or any other publications, for that matter. But if I'm discussing disability and representation, or being a disability studies scholar in general, more of my writing matters.

No matter the context, it’s important to consider what accomplishments my audience is going to care about. I can claim to be a mathematician, a disability studies scholar, and a neuroscience student, but claiming them all at once definitely takes a lot of space and could confuse my audience.

When you're trying to squeeze your CV to fit within a maximum length, or write a short introduction for a presentation, how do you decide what to include?

[Image by Flickr user The Italian Voice and used under a Creative Commons license.]

Alyssa is a doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island. Follow them @yes_thattoo or check out their personal blog.

Imposter syndrome: if you have it, it means you're going to feel underqualified whether or not that's true. And there are plenty of ways to fight the feeling that you're an imposter, even when you don't feel like you know what you're doing.

That's one option. Here's another one: intentionally take on projects your only partially qualified for. This is the strategy I employ to fight the feeling of being an imposter. And I'm not being sneaky when I do this, by the way. When I threw ideas for a chapter on auto/biography studies at an editor, for example, I was very clear with her what I was and wasn't familiar with. I've done work on autism and representation. I've done autoethnographic work. I'm familiar with theory of mind theory and its effects on autistic narratives. But I had not engaged with auto/biography studies as a field.

Nevertheless, the editor liked the ideas I gave at her, even while I was completely open about not having applied the tools I needed in the context of her field before. So I wrote up a formal abstract. Then she asked me to write the chapter and to read at least some writing on auto/biography that is part of the formal auto/biography studies canon, which meant I could engage with the field. That was fair, and I did it, announcing to my friends that I had no clue what I was doing all the way.

About 7500 words later I had that clue (and a chapter about autistic auto/biography). I'd read about twice as many new-to-me books, chapters, and articles on auto/biographical writing than I actually cited, thanks to the book proposal’s bibliography and Google Scholar. I’d written about common ways of interpreting autistic auto/biographical writing, and suggested some unusual interpretations. The editor liked the chapter!

This is a pattern. By agreeing to do something where I only half know what I'm doing, I force myself to learn. This worked for the chapter I wrote this summer, and it failed to be a disaster for my first conference presentation. If imposter syndrome means I'm going to spend the whole research process feeling underqualified regardless, I might as well be somewhat underqualified and learn what I'm doing on the job. It's kind of the nature of research: no one knows the answer yet.

I still feel like I have no clue what I’m doing sometimes. But because I keep taking on projects where I actually don’t know what I’m doing (yet), I now have familiarity with topics I didn’t know before, like auto/biography studies, queer studies, neurodiversity and representation, brain computer interfaces, and probably some other things I’ve forgotten about. Some of those things might even help me with the next project I’m only half qualified for.

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user COD Newsroom under the Creative Commons license.]

Alyssa is a doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island. Follow them @yes_thattoo or check out their personal blog.

This post is part of a (somewhat loose) series about being disabled at university, with a focus on graduate school: problems we encounter, how we deal with them, and what you can do that will make things easier for fellow graduate students with disabilities.

As a graduate student in neuroscience, I have formal accommodations. I also have things I do, don't do, or do differently for disability reasons which aren't formal accommodations, or are based on my formal accommodations but aren't exactly what my paperwork says I get.

I don't mean that some professors decide they don't need to see my paperwork before honoring my registered accommodation of text to speech for class participation when I can't talk, though that happens. I also don't mean professors take my accommodations letter the first time I take a class with them and then don't care about seeing it again in later semesters, though, again, this happens.

I mean, I fully understand why working from home isn't always a great idea. So do my major professors. However, my lab is currently sharing space with an off-campus company while the university builds new engineering buildings. There's a shuttle during the school year (but not the summer), so I can physically get there. But getting to my lab involves crossing a floor that's got exactly the wrong kind of noise, to the tune of my losing speech about half the time I go there. Even in the lab, the noise and lighting drain my energy pretty quickly. (Think of it like working while riding an exercise bike. You could, but you're going to run out of energy faster.) So, I do most of my work from home.

I should probably take more of the advice about building a home workspace, but it's tricky since I'm still living in what's basically an (undergraduate) program-specific frat house. I mean, I chose my living situation for disability related reasons, too. I think most people are familiar with the idea that some things (most things) are harder under stress. My skills get strained in a weird order, so speech and "how to make food happen" are usually the first two things to go. That means I need a meal plan and may need to arrange to get on a meal plan of some sort even when I'm not a student anymore. Oh, and sensory issues make the main dining hall inaccessible. The food is fine, I just can't be there. It's worse than it is in the lab. So my one place to consistently have food in front of me really should be smaller and quieter—ike the dining area for a frat house with a chef.

I mean that I work under the table. Literally. My lab mates know which table I'll be under with my laptop and headphones, with whatever I'm reading, with the wearable sensor I'm sewing back together because it got ripped up in testing this morning and we need it again this afternoon. The smaller space is more comfortable, the table over my head partially protects me from the glare of the fluorescent lights (but not from their sound), and no one can even accidentally startle me with my back to the wall and a lab table extending around me on either side.

Or I mean that my paperwork says I get to use text to speech when I can't talk, but text to speech is really my least used alternative to speech. If there's a side board I can reach from any seat, that's now my seat. I'm bringing a marker and an eraser to class. If I'm involved in a small group discussion, I'm using FlipWriter.

Formal accommodations are important. They're legally protected. I use them in all my roles and honor them as a teacher. But, especially when there's no rule preventing your disabled student, colleague, or teacher from doing something for a disability-related reason, think about the precedent you want to set. The accommodation of not being called on without a raised hand could help students working in a second or third language.

Would you want to out yourself and go get paperwork, just for a comfortable seating arrangement that didn't cost anyone extra? And if not, what options can you make available to everyone, as part of a universal design framework?

[Photo of the table Alyssa works under in the lab, taken by Alyssa.]

Alyssa is an Autistic doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island. Follow them @yes_thattoo or check out their personal blog.

“Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham
Phdcomics.com

At this point, summer is here, and with it, a lot of unstructured time. So, we can work, right? We've all got to-do lists a mile long, largely populated with everything we didn't get done during the semester. (Or over winter break. Or the semester before that.) It’s nice to think that we can finally clear out our to-do lists.

Not so fast. If you're like me, there's something on your list for this summer that was unfinished from your list last summer. There might even be two things. I still owe revisions on a piece about disability and fanfiction. I never actually finished the review on sleep monitoring technology. In my partial defense, my thesis focus has almost certainly changed and I’ve got two other papers written and out for review. Even so: I thought I was going to get more things, or different things, done than I actually did.

There are a few ways I could approach this reality. I could look for advice on how to make the best use of my unstructured time. And I do — scheduling and pomodoro-like techniques have helped me get more done during my working time. I could look at which things on my to-do list are actually a strong yes, as opposed to a "well, OK..." and saying "no" to what is neither exciting nor strictly necessary to my degree. My major professor told me it would be important to say no to things so I could focus and finish — this seems like a good way to trim my list of distractions.

After this trimming, the important bits on my academic list for this summer are:

• Revise the three papers I owe revisions on. The two papers I got out during the academic year have joined the piece on disability in fanfiction, all of which need revisions.
• Figure out what my dissertation research is actually going to be on. Right now, augmentative and alternative communication looks likely, but with brain computer interfaces. I’m not studying the same systems I use.
• Finalize my committee, because I can’t take the next steps in my program until I do so.
• Arrange (and possibly take) my comprehensive exams. Once I have a committee, I can do this, and depending on their availability, that will either happen over the summer or at the start of the fall semester.

Just as important as everything on the list above (maybe more important), I am making time for rest. Summer means some free time, if that is I can accept that I have it while staring down the list of things I could be working on.

This means:

• Despite all pressures to the contrary, the 40-hour work week is, in fact, my maximum, not the minimum or the goal. (This is 40 hours total, not 40 hours on research, just to be clear. And if I need to use a pomodoro technique, the break periods count.)
• Even if I haven't hit that 40 hour maximum Monday-Friday (and the past few weeks, I haven't), I'm still not working over the weekend. If I want to spend the weekend re-reading (well, starting to re-read) an absurdly long Pokemon fanfiction or playing video games, then I can do that. Being completely unproductive is precisely the point.
• I am working evenings, since the math classes I'm teaching over the summer are evening classes, but that means I take the morning or the afternoon off on class days.
• I'm getting enough sleep — and not just because I'll get more done rested. It’s the best thing for me to do as a human.
• I'm trying not to feel guilty about being human and needing rest while I'm in graduate school. Yes, my disabilities mean I burn through energy faster in some environments, but if I need to cite a disability as a reason to only work a standard week, something has gone very wrong.

How are you going to take time to rest this summer?

[Comic by Jorge Cham and used in accordance with the instructions in the about page.]

Alyssa is an Autistic doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island. Follow them @yes_thattoo or check out their personal blog.

This post is part of a (somewhat loose) series about being disabled at university, with a focus on graduate school: problems we encounter, how we deal with them, and what you can do that will make things easier for fellow graduate students with disabilities.

Of course, being seen as an authority figure isn't only a disability issue. For example, fellow GradHacker Alexandra wrote about cultivating authority as a female graduate student. Writing an article, she was told that she wrote with "too much authority." Did the reader know or assume her gender? (Someone who sees my name is likely to make the same assumption, and I doubt I'll fare any better if the reader knows I'm actually nonbinary.) Is it because of her feminist perspective? Is it the combination of the two? Looking back at my own teaching experiences, I suspect the combination. Sometimes my students know I'm autistic, and sometimes they don't. Most of them are under the incorrect impression that I am a woman. As a disabled grad student, though, I frequently run into this threshold issue, the one about my authority on my own experiences.

As a masters student teaching introductory college math, my authority was never really at issue. The department was good about backing up grad students when we had to tell our students, "No." And the topic was mathematics: everything I taught was a matter of fact, and I could prove it. I similarly didn't have difficulty demonstrating authority when I assisted in the electronics lab. My students’ circuits either worked or didn't, and my suggestions for how to fix them either worked or didn't.

There was some weirdness, however, about my writing on index cards when I couldn't speak. Though my knowledge on circuits was still a given, my students questioned the idea that being temporarily unable to speak could be normal or okay. How could it not be a big deal for me to need augmentative and alternative communication (AAC)? And that's the pattern I've run into. It's talking about disability, that thing where I actually have lived experience, where my knowledge is more likely to be questioned. Maybe it’s because I’m questioning the authority of what ‘everyone’ knows.

It's a pattern. Autism experts have been arguing that autistic people have a biased view of autism for as long as we've been writing about our experiences. On one hand, this is literally true. Everyone has biases about everything. And I'll be honest: yes, some of my autism-related writing, as researched as it is, is also activist: I'm highlighting issues that many professionals might like to ignore in favor of teaching us to act more normatively. How are Autistic people who are also Queer erased? What about AAC for people who technically could look more ‘normal’ by speaking instead? On the other hand, why is it that only our biases are called that? Pushing for indistinguishability as the primary goal is also a bias.

When I went and reviewed work about (and mostly by) Autistic adults who use AAC and can speak in order to argue that this is 1) a thing; 2) helpful; and 3) to be encouraged, I wrote like an outside expert to the extent that I could. That seemed like the best way to show that I wasn't writing about just my own experiences (see the chapter I wrote last summer - the book is out now). If there's even a whiff of that, and I'm saying something that isn't the usual practice or theory, I can expect to be reminded that "If you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person." Which, again, is literally true. So is, "If you've met or read writing by a few hundred autistic people, you've met or read writing by a few hundred autistic people." Guess which category I'm actually in.

Now, this obviously isn't something that happens 100 percent of the time. My major professor and my supervisor for my autism and AAC project both think that my autistic perspective on autism-related issues is valuable, because it gives me insights they can't have. There exist people who will consider lived experience to be a source of authority, rather than a detriment to it. Those are the people I try to work with, whenever possible.

[Image by Flickr user Jonathan, under a Creative Commons License.]

Alyssa is an Autistic doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island. Follow them @yes_thattoo or check out their personal blog.

This post is part of a (somewhat loose) series about being disabled at university, with a focus on graduate school: problems we encounter, how we deal with them, and what you can do that will make things easier for fellow graduate students with disabilities.

In grad school, students tend to have fairly flexible schedules, which can be both good and bad. For example, it can mean we have more time to get ourselves to conferences, which is nice. However, it's not unusual for graduate students to work (or at least be at work) more than 40 hours per week. That's neither efficient nor particularly sustainable.

Getting into disability-related issues, there are even more reasons that a flexible schedule can be both good and bad.

Advantage: If something goes wrong, I can probably just go home. I'm autistic, and I've got sensory processing issues. If there is construction going on next to my lab, I can't be there. I really, really can't. Thankfully, no one's going to argue if I go home early, as long as I get my work done when it needs to be done.

Disadvantage: That flexibility means there's less pressure to prevent future issues. I'm still going to do my best to avoid problems before they happen. Sure, I can go home if there's construction going on next to my lab. I can go home if there's explosion testing downstairs from the classroom where I'm teaching. Sometimes (not always), I can even get out before I'm completely fried. Then I'll get work done at home. This means, however, other people aren't seeing the full effects of whatever caused my problem, and they may not fully understand just how important it is to not expose me to inaccessible environments in the first place. They also may help me avoid the inaccessible environment rather than making it more accessible to me.

Advantage: If I can get the work done in shorter bursts, that's OK. No one really checks which hours we're working, usually. If I can maintain my focus for a few hours and get a lot done in that time and then rest, that's great! Being efficient with the time I spend working and therefore spending less time working overall is basically how I manage graduate school.

Disadvantage: There's less structure and therefore fewer checks on my executive dysfunction. Putting me in a situation where the easiest thing for me to do is work increases the likelihood that I'll get work done. So, stick me in a library where I don't have internet access for a couple hours between classes, and my homework will get done. (This is something that actually helped me when I studied in Tianjin.) Without this sort of structure, maintaining my focus for a few good hours is hard. It's probably hard for all graduate students, whether or not we also have executive functioning issues. I do, though, so if you don't, multiply your difficulties staying on task by needing several tries to make tea (which is a task they're apparently looking at as a measure of executive functioning now. Oops!) In any case, without classes to structure my day or deadlines to give me adrenaline-fueled bursts of good focus, I could be in trouble.

How has flexibility in your schedule made your life easier? Harder?

[Image courtesy of Raw Pixel under a Creative Commons license]