How I got where I am and where I’m heading.
The personal statement portion of my Temple transfer application.
Here’s the prompt I was given
Please tell us more about yourself. Relate one or more experiences or circumstances that have contributed to your personal and/or academic development. If you have been out of school for a year or longer, please discuss your activities during that period of time. Use a minimum of 250 words.
And here’s how I responded:
I haven’t attended school at Penn State since the end of the spring semester of 2018. During that semester, my priorities began to shift. That change coincided with a weakening of my arms and hands, caused by my disease Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD). DMD causes progressive muscle wasting with muscle work or repetitive activities. My hands and arms were beginning to be affected by that weakness, which made it difficult and painful to write by hand, to move and click a computer mouse, and to lift a fork or spoon to my mouth. These limitations made my math-based school work, which is entirely done by hand, extremely time-consuming.
Over the semester, it became increasingly difficult to give my engineering science curriculum the time it required. Working to find the tools I needed to function efficiently in my classes was the immediate problem I had to solve. The only tool I had tried up to that point was speech recognition software to replace writing. However, that software wasn’t capable of fully controlling my computer’s special keys or functions and mouse. For example, I couldn’t use the speech recognition to format equations, to type symbols, like bounded integrals, vectors, and limits. Until I learned how to do math hands-free, my engineering studies were on hold.
These difficulties led me to reconsider my choice of major within the context of my limitations. I eventually determined that the engineering discipline most compatible with my disability was computer science. There were two parts to that determination:
1. I discovered the application VoiceCode; and
2. I wanted to pursue a career where I could sharpen my knowledge of the subject outside of work.
VoiceCode is an application intended to help programmers who have sustained repetitive stress injuries code by voice recognition instead of with their hands. I now knew it was possible to code by voice, and that there was a market for voice coding. Realizing that gave me the confidence I needed to change majors to computer science.
The second part came from an understanding that most engineering careers required tinkering and hands-on work. Perhaps this “understanding” is naive. But the point can still be made; I wanted to have a job in an engineering discipline where I could experiment outside of work. Coding and software development were both things I could tinker with at home — there wasn’t a need to manipulate any hardware.
With a new career goal, I applied to several engineering internship opportunities that focused on software development. I ended up taking a summer research internship in Rehabilitation Engineering at Cleveland State University.
At the CSU research lab, I was helping to design the software needed to control a powered prosthetic leg. After completing the 10-week internship, I learned that I wanted a career working to improve people’s lives directly and personally.
Through the weekly seminars organized by the rehab engineering program, I had come to see that there were tools developed to help people with disabilities that the disabled community was unaware of. Bringing these tools onto the radar of people with disabilities was something I thought I could do with an assistive technology review blog.
When the internship ended, I still needed to learn how to control my computer and code hands-free, and I wanted to explore blogging. For these reasons, I decided not to return to school in the Fall. In the few months that followed, I quickly learned how to use an eye-tracking mouse and a voice-recognition system, called Talon, that separates command and text dictation.
After learning to control my computer hands-free, I shared what I had learned by blogging about it. To host these posts and other posts related to living with a disability, I designed a publication on Medium (a blogging platform). I called it “Hubabl,” a centralized website, a hub, where tools and resources are discussed to increase the independence and abilities of people with disabilities.
Over the next few months, I worked on adding more posts on the invaluable technologies I use day-to-day. These posts included one on a feeding robot called Obi, my bidet toilet seat, and a method to do voice-recognition math I developed. Interspersed with these technical posts on physical independence are more philosophical posts on the idea of tragic optimism from A Man’s Search for Meaning, on Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, and the few principles that I hope to embody during my life.
Most recently, I undertook the construction of posts related to keeping Medicaid while working. Medicaid is an essential program for people with disabilities who need a way to pay for attendant care. What I have to show for all my work is a confusing mess of 15,000+ words. I was overwhelmed by all the seemingly conflicting information available and the variability in regulations from state to state. I learned that to accurately describe the Medicaid system required knowledge of both the state and federal frameworks supporting the Medicaid program, which I don’t have.
In wrestling with the Medicaid posts, I realized that my initial focus on the “mechanics” of how to live with a disability had grown to include the fundamental philosophical questions related to “how” to live with a disability. I wanted to address questions like:
- Is it possible to find meaning in suffering? Are there instances where suffering has no meaning?
A degree in philosophy will help me to build the foundation necessary to ask the questions I want to ask. I hope to redirect the wisdom extracted from a background in philosophy and my own perspective to create meaningful content for my readers and anyone who seeks context for their life.
There you have it. I’ll learn in the next few weeks if I was accepted or rejected.
Update: I did get in and it looks like that’s how I’ll be spending the next semester.
