My Experience With Disability

Believing in someone else and mentoring them through a difficult decision is a gift.

Throughout my professional career, I have always struggled with the choice of following my educational ambitions or gaining work experience. While I had the desire for a more advanced level of knowledge in the form of a doctoral degree I struggled with timing and opportunity.

During my first year as a college student, I questioned whether college was the right fit for me. I lost my focus because I could not decide what I ultimately wanted out of the experience. Three majors and one school transfer later, I was considering graduate school because of my professor, who believed that I could be successful. He was one of the toughest professors in my major but I instantly connected to his teaching methods and he became my advisor and mentor. He encouraged me through all of my life choices and he guaranteed me that work and education did not have to be mutually exclusive goals. I finally conceded that my professor was right.

However, perseverance has proven to be my most important life lesson when I was diagnosed with a disability. While I understood that managing a disability would affect my life it also allowed me to begin to formulate my career focus.
In doing so, I recognize disability as a cross-cultural phenomenon that reaches beyond race, ethnicity, age, gender, economics, religion and national origin. I have reached the point in my career where a terminal degree would allow me the opportunity to enhance my skills as a practitioner, refine my research, and dialogue with a community of scholars. The combination of higher education research with theoretical principles would also allow me to freely exchange and contribute to innovative models of