Moving Hands

I readily admit that, at times, being a transfer student is frustrating. However, I am glad that I transferred into this university. One reason is because the disability services is really great. Personally, I chalk it up to the fact that it is a large public urban campus.

When I was initially selecting colleges, this was our logic: “A smaller college with smaller class sizes will be more ideal for me, because there are fewer people that I will have to keep track of when lipreading and so forth.” Therefore, I enrolled in a college with a student body of approximately 2,000 people.

Well, as it turned out, I chose a college that was in a state that was not particularly well-suited to my needs. Back then, I was just a kid from the Rockies who got Boston, New York, Washington DC, and other East coast cities mixed up very easily – they were essentially all the same city to me. I quickly learned the difference when trying to hire an interpreter who was fluent in the communication method that I grew up with. The nearest person who even knew it lived about two hours away in cow country. She wasn’t even an interpreter – she was just a mom who had used it with her own son. I appreciated the effort that my access coordinator went through with regards to hiring her, but I couldn’t understand a word that she said. If I had chosen to go to college someplace like Washington DC, this would not have been as much of a problem because more people there know the communication method.

On top of this, I chose a college in the suburbs. Most of the interpreters were based in the city or in suburbs the next state over, so it was difficult to find people willing to travel to my college.

Another issue was that – as much as I hate to say it – the accessibility department wasn’t particularly well-suited to my needs. Since the school was so small, only one person worked in the accessibility department. This person’s speciality was not in deaf issues – in fact, I was the first deaf student that the college had ever handled. As a result, I found that I often had to explain basic things about deafness to somebody who should have been helping me.

To their credit, the college worked very hard to accommodate my needs because they really wanted me there, but I still felt constrained by all of these limitations. It was one of the several reasons that I transferred. ¹

I transferred into a large public university in the nearest city because it had a really good reputation in my field of interest and because I was tired of moving so many places. I didn’t particularly want to relocate to yet another city, so I just stayed close to my original college.

As it turns out, a large public university is much better with regards to meeting my needs, and I love that aspect of the school.

First of all, there’s the issue of location. There is a much greater pool of interpreters to choose from – everybody is based in or near this city, so it’s no big deal to request an interpreter because there’s a lot more people willing to travel to my campus.

Also, this university actually employs interpreters on its staff! There are other deaf people who attend this University. So, although some of my interpreters come from independent agencies, quite a few of them come from the University itself. ²

And the disability services center? Well, there’s a whole staff on board there. Instead of just having one person handle every single student with a disability, there are enough people to work with specialities: mental health, learning disabilities, physical disabilities, assistive technology, deaf services, etc. I no longer have to explain everything about deafness to a person who is supposed to help me – now I can just chat (usually in simcom) with somebody who was specifically trained to work with deaf people. It is wonderful! (And it helps that our senses of humor mesh very well.)

At my previous university, Access Services told me that I basically had to stick to a very firm class schedule. Once I had decided on what classes to take, I was stuck with those all semester. No shopping around for me. To be fair, I can understand this – it was so difficult for them to find interpreters willing to work at our college. But I still disliked the fact that I couldn’t, say, switch out of a class that I knew that I’d hate from day one. Because flexibility was more important to me than anything else, I wound up just not requesting any interpreters and using a combination of lipreading, listening with my cochlear implant, and relying a lot on the course readings to get by in classes.

In contrast, I have complete freedom and flexibility at this university. If I go to a class and decide to drop it two weeks later because I hate it, I can just email my access coordinator and say, “Hey, this isn’t working out. I’m dropping this class; I’ll let you know what class I add to replace it.” The first few times I did this, I was wary and very apologetic because of my previous experiences, but the access coordinator said, “You have just as much of a right as any other student to shop for classes – don’t worry about it!” I think that a large factor in this is the fact that we have a lot more resources to draw from – it’s easier to find interpreters, and it’s easier to match interpreters to students because there is more demand for them on the campus.

Going to a large public urban university comes with issues of its own, of course. For example, there’s all that bureaucratic red tape – they didn’t add my AP scores to my credits until this year, even though I enrolled in 2009. But, overall, I’m a lot more content with its offerings for deaf students than I was with a small private university in the suburbs.

1. I can name about 4-5 different reasons that I transferred – if I had had just one individual problem, I would probably have just sucked it up, but when all of the factors combined, I pretty much felt compelled to transfer. [↩]
2. I mostly use ASL interpreters – I have not tried again to request somebody who knows the communication method that I grew up with. But it is so easy to get ASL interpreters that I really have no incentive to try again. [↩]