Scholarships for students with a disability

Scholarship applications have opened up for Academic Year 2024-2025, and I’m considering which scholarships I can apply for. This morning I applied for a couple of scholarships for students who have a disability.

In 2007, I learned that I am on the autism spectrum. After someone intially suggested that I had “Asperger’s Syndrome,” I began reading about the condition and, chapter after chapter of a book by Dr. Tony Attwood: it was like reading “my own biography.” A short while later, I was able to take part in a study through the U.C. Davis M.I.N.D. Institute, and the psychiatrist/researcher verbally confirmed that I was on the autism spectrum.

When I was growing up, the criteria for autism was only very rigidly applied: and, as a result, I am part of a “lost generation” who missed the opportunity to be diagnosed in childhood. One challenge, as a result, is that the current “medical” understanding of disability allows for discrimination against people who can’t provide sufficient “proof” : that is, an official diagnosis from a satisfactory source. It also prohibits me from being able to enroll with a school’s Disability Services.

(Fortunately, my taking online courses is very well-suited to me.)

But even though I didn’t receive formal diagnosis in childhood, I was no less debilitated by the social impairments that are characteristics of autism. I’d suffered for years from being ostracized by classmates and I had no friends for much or all of the time in elementary, middle, and high school. (If people were friendly toward me in later years, I wasn’t really equipped to recognize it, after enduring years of being bullied and rejected by my classmates. Even today, it’s a mystery to me, how people go about making friends.)

Job applications were a struggle for me, because of the social expertise that’s demanded in making an employer “connect” with you. It frequently seems as though it isn’t enough to be the best-qualified applicant; you also have to somehow make good impressions with a screener and, later, with an interviewer.

I am fortunate today to be working three part-time jobs that, together, give me full-time hours. Morever, I am blessed to be able to work in my chosen career as a librarian.