In the fall of 2018, my senior year of high school was disrupted by my mental health. A cascade of isolated events resulted in my admission to a residential hospital for OCD and anxiety from March to June of 2019. Due to my stay, I was unable to attend my senior prom and participate in many traditions central to senior year. While I was able to attend my graduation, missing almost the entire second semester hurt my ability to continue the friendships I had in high school. Before and after my residential treatment stay, I was a theatre kid. I performed on stage in community shows and worked backstage on technical theatre as a stagehand. Over the years, I designed lighting, stage managed, directed, and worked as an intern for a local children’s theatre program called First Stage. Beyond learning to love Shakespeare, how to express emotions on stage, and the importance of lighting, First Stage taught me how to exhibit kindness in every encounter. A key message of our training as interns was that “all behavior has meaning.” It was our job to remember that students acting disruptively were experiencing emotions and problems that they didn't have the resources to fix. Managing poor behavior meant understanding those emotions and meeting their individual needs. After finishing First Stage, I learned to apply that same lesson to myself and approach life with a kind and non-judgmental mindset. My mental health struggles impacted my college options, changing my path from the East Coast to sticking closer to home. Ripon College offered many advantages–only an hour from home, small, liberals arts, healthy scholarship offer–but it also reflected the profound shift in my life caused by my mental health. In the aftermath of undergrad, I have been able to clearly define how my journey through the hospital and my undergrad experience helped me to understand the isolation one can feel when they are excluded from a group. The facility that took care of me during my residential stay was fully equipped to tackle my OCD and anxiety disorders through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. The treatment I received aided me in developing strength I did not know I had and learning how to challenge my obsessive thought processes. After exploring the issues I had with self image and choosing friends, I made a promise to practice at least as much compassion for myself as I showed towards my friends and fellow patients. During the three months at the facility, my chronic pain and mobility disability were treated as psychosomatic, meaning that I was told they were all in my head and had nothing to do with real illness or irregularities in my physical health. This treatment was invalidating and and proven to be false upon my diagnosis of Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome in August of 2019. Getting diagnosed with POTS and receiving medical treatment was life-changing. The experience has propelled me into advocating for better treatment for physical and mental health. I am heading to Rochester Institute of Technology this August to pursue a masters degree in human-computer interaction. My interest lies in the design and development accessible artistic software. The experiences I have had with mental and physical health challenges have inspired me to create technology that is fully inclusive. To do this, I must ensure that my work is usable by anyone regardless of their ability, race, age, gender identity, or sexuality. I am determined to take on ableism with an intersectional mindset, a willingness to listen, and the knowledge that my work will be appreciated by those who need it most.

When I first entered college, I had recently been diagnosed with a chronic illness, but I wouldn't have called myself disabled. Despite experiencing daily pain and lightheadedness, my life was relatively normal. It didn't occur to me how much mobility and access I had until the pandemic arrived. I returned to campus for my sophomore year with weakened stamina, causing the physical challenges of navigating campus to move from an inconvenience to an impediment of my learning. Menial trips from the dorms to pick up dinner or down the hall to do laundry left me shuddering in pain and steeped in brain fog. When I started fainting before reaching my destination, it became apparent that there was an issue I couldn't ignore. As the months slowly passed and the online lectures turned into masked in-person gatherings, I stayed in my dorm. I no longer felt capable of collecting dinner at the dining hall to bring back to my room, so my meals consisted of pre-cooked microwavable frozen chicken, tv dinners, and ramen noodles fresh out of the cup. My inability to participate in events on campus led me into a long period of loneliness. Nevertheless, that period of enforced contemplation eventually resulted in me finding my true drive, the fight for accessibility. As a physically disabled transgender person, finding myself a career post graduation in which I can fully perform my job duties while staying true to myself has been an incredible struggle. My inability to stand for long periods of time prevents me from pursuing career options other than desk work and my routine medical costs dictate a need for stable healthcare. The Robert and Suzi DeGennaro Scholarship for Disabled Students scholarship and the money it provides will help me pay the rent for a wheelchair accessible studio apartment near my graduate school campus. It will also allow me to take care of my needs such as groceries, prescription medications, and rides to the bank and medical offices. As I transition into living independently and continuing my education, my utmost priority is ensuring that my health is taken care of and that I can build a community to support me in my future endeavors. At Rochester Institute of Technology this fall, I will work towards a degree that will allow me to pioneer accessible software and facilitate progress in the disabled community. My primary goal is that the technology I create will be not only usable by all but enjoyable by all. I hope to use my computer programming skills to help other artists and develop digital art tools that can be used by people who are visually impaired or have color vision deficiencies. Through my degree, I will gain the knowledge and resources needed to make an impact in the lives of many disabled artists. My experiences with chronic illness empower me to work towards a future where technology is not limited by unnecessary barriers. Being disabled was not a challenge I expected in life, but it has galvanized me to take on ableism with an intersectional mindset, a willingness to listen, and the knowledge that my work will be appreciated by those who need it most.

This fall at Rochester Institute of Technology, I will begin a Master of Science in Human-Computer Interaction with a focus on accessible technology. My goal in life has always been to create. I look forward to being able to take my creative skills and use them to make the world of art more accessible for everyone. My creativity is shown externally in my craft projects and hobbies, but it also comes through in my approach to tackling chronic illness. When I started college, I had recently been diagnosed with POTS, a form of nervous system dysfunction. My symptoms required me to approach living creatively, which was most evident in my inability to stand for longer than ten minutes without fainting. Finding a way to navigate campus, stay connected in classes, and even get dinner without walking longer distances or climbing stairs was challenging. I saved up for a mobility scooter my junior year and it changed my outlook on life and opened up a world of opportunities. The period of isolation I experienced made me realize that accessible and available technology could make all the difference in someone's life, and I developed a strong mission to fight ableism and make technology more efficient and attainable for all. As a result of my disability, I traded my career plan of theatrical lighting design and production for a career in user experience design and development. Now, it is my goal to use my computer programming skills to help other artists. For my master’s degree program this fall, I hope to focus on making digital art and artist tools that can be used by people who are visually impaired or have color vision deficiencies. To do this, I will rely on disabled voices and innovative creativity to direct my course of study. For example, I recently saw online that a normal 24-count box of crayons can look very different to a child with tritanomaly, a type of blue-yellow colorblindness, than it looks to most other children. The creation of a new set of 24 crayons that caters to the visual spectrum that the child sees could create a more enjoyable art experience for them. To translate this experience into a digital environment, I believe it could be positively impactful to offer art software users with color vision deficiency an alternative color palette that excludes or labels colors they are incapable of seeing. This way, the users have the option to remove guesswork from their pieces and create art that is fully visible to them. Through my degree, I will gain the knowledge and resources needed to make an impact in the lives of many disabled artists. My experiences with chronic illness and the empathy it amplifies empower me to work towards a future where technology is usable and enjoyable by all. Being disabled was not a challenge I expected in life, but it has galvanized me to take on ableism with an intersectional mindset, a willingness to listen, and the knowledge that my work will impact those who need it most.

This fall at Rochester Institute of Technology, I will begin a Master of Science in Human-Computer Interaction with a focus on accessible technology. My goal in life has always been to create. I look forward to being able to take my creative skills and use them to make the world more accessible for everyone. My creativity is shown externally in my craft projects and hobbies but it also comes through in my approach to tackling chronic illness. When I started college, I had recently been diagnosed with POTS, a form of autonomic nervous system dysfunction. My symptoms required me to think creatively, which was most evident in my inability to stand for longer than ten minutes without fainting. Finding a way to navigate campus, stay connected in classes, and even get dinner without walking longer distances or climbing stairs was challenging. I saved up for a mobility scooter my junior year and it changed my outlook on life and opened up a world of opportunities. The period of isolation I experienced made me realize that accessible and available technology could make all the difference in someone's life, and I developed a strong mission to fight ableism and make technology more efficient and attainable for all. As a result of my disability, I traded my plan of theatrical lighting design and production for a career in user experience design and development. Now, it is my goal to use my computer programming skills to help other artists. For my master’s degree program this fall, I plan to focus on making digital art tools that can be used by people who are visually impaired or have color vision deficiencies. With this degree, I will gain the knowledge and resources needed to make an impact on the lives of many disabled artists. My experiences with chronic illness and the empathy I have grown from them empower me to work towards a future where technology is usable and enjoyable by all. Being disabled was not a challenge I expected in life, but it has galvanized me to take on ableism with an intersectional mindset, a willingness to listen, and the knowledge that my work will impact those who need it most.

In my eyes, success on a base level looks like a fulfilling job, good health, and a supportive community. As a physically disabled transgender person, finding myself a career in which I can fully perform my job duties while staying true to myself has been an incredible struggle. My inability to stand for long periods of time prevents me from pursuing career options other than desk work and my routine medical costs dictate a need for stable healthcare. The "Redefining Victory" scholarship and the funds it provides will allow me to build my support system and ensure my health is taken care of while I pursue my goal of making the world more accessible. When I picture my future success, I imagine developing digital art software while living my best life in Montréal, Québec. Since I began to learn French in the sixth grade, it has always been a dream of mine to immerse myself in the language. While I do want to visit France and Belgium, the historic, francophone city of Montréal is where I will call my home. Success for me will involve applying my leadership skills while working with a user experience software development team. It is my goal to create additional functionality in digital art applications by programming the parts of the application that the user interacts with, such as the paintbrush, shape creation tools, eraser, and color picker. As for the specific type of art production tool I want to create, I see myself writing code that changes the digital paintbrush's appearance based on how firmly the mouse or stylus is pressed and creating adjustable sliders that affect the water content and viscosity of the virtual paint. With these features, the application will behave more like a piece of canvas and physical paint would in real life. By maintaining an intersectional mindset and diversifying my team of testers, I will ensure that the application design is carried out in a way that avoids bias and ableist practices. If I can succeed with making my software widely affordable and accessible, it will act as an excellent way for artists to practice who may not be able to buy high quality supplies. In addition to my own health and happiness, my vision for success is centered around disability awareness and the removal of societal barriers to the creation and enjoyment of art. While art in general is greatly adaptable in its ability to be transformed into a 3D medium that is accessible to those with low vision, digital art presents a far more substantial challenge. It is my goal to participate in research that focuses on the inclusion of those with blindness or low vision in computerized art forms. While my knowledge on how this might be accomplished is still developing, my plans moving forward focus on innovative creativity and the elevation of disabled voices. I also would like to adapt artistic software to accommodate those with color vision deficiency. I recently saw online that a normal 24-count box of crayons can look very different to a child with tritanomaly, a type of blue-yellow colorblindness, than it looks to most other children. A new set of 24 crayons that caters to the visual spectrum that child sees could create a more enjoyable art experience for them. To translate this experience into a digital environment, I believe it would be positively impactful to offer art software users with color vision deficiency an alternative color palette that excludes or labels colors they are incapable of seeing. This way, the users have the option to remove guesswork from their pieces and create art that is fully visible to them. It is my hope that in ten years, I will have close-knit relationship with my team of colleagues. As an openly queer student in high school and college, it was sometimes difficult for me to find a group that I felt I fit in with. I foresee being trans in the workplace to be a challenge, but I know that if I look for companies based on their diversity initiatives and advocate for my colleagues and myself, there will be a larger movement supporting me and the LGBTQ+ community than there is trying to oppress us. Success, to me, is not concrete. By the contrary, I believe my vision for success will change and evolve as I grow and become the truest version of myself. While landmarks such as job security, stable access to healthcare, and support from family and friends are necessary steps on my path towards success, I don't believe that they alone will ensure my well-being. In my mind, success will be marked by the moments in my life in which I have fulfilled my purpose of making the world more accessible.

When I first entered college, I had recently been diagnosed with a chronic illness, but I wouldn't have called myself disabled. Despite experiencing daily pain and lightheadedness, life was relatively normal. It didn't occur to me how much mobility and access I had until the pandemic arrived. I returned to campus for my sophomore with weakened stamina, causing the physical challenges of navigating campus to move from an inconvenience to an impediment of my learning. Menial trips from the dorms to pick up dinner or down the hall to do laundry left me shuddering in pain and steeped in brain fog. When I started fainting before reaching my destination, it became apparent that there was an issue I couldn't ignore. As the months slowly passed and the online lectures turned into masked in-person gatherings, I stayed in my dorm. I no longer felt capable of collecting dinner at the dining hall to bring back to my room, so my meals consisted of pre-cooked microwavable frozen chicken, tv dinners, and ramen noodles fresh out of the cup. My inability to participate in events on campus led me into a long period of loneliness. Nevertheless, that period of enforced contemplation resulted in me finding my true drive, the fight for accessibility. Upon purchasing a used mobility scooter the summer before my junior year, I regained my freedom to envelop myself in life on campus. My first goal became learning how to advocate for myself and other disabled students. I got a job at the Center for Diversity and Inclusion (CDI) and began to build a support system. With the aid of the CDI, I prepared a speech about the necessities of accessibility to present before the students, faculty, staff, and administration of my college. In April 2022, I hosted "A Conversation About Accessibility at Ripon College" for around one hundred members of the campus community. I addressed issues such as the lack of braille in the majority of campus buildings and the unreliability of many of the ADA door openers. My presentation highlighted data such as the fact that up to 1 in 4 American adults have a disability and the reality that any person can be rendered disabled on any given day. As a result of my advocacy, the college's administration began the process of fixing several accessibility issues on campus, including adding benches along a path that connects the two halves of campus. To ensure that the accessibility challenges would continue to be dealt with, I revived the Ripon College chapter of Disability Rights, Education, Activism, and Mentoring (DREAM) in my junior year. As president during my senior year, I built the community that I wished for in the isolation of quarantine and honed my leadership skills for years to come. At Rochester Institute of Technology this fall, I will work towards a degree that will allow me to pioneer accessible software and facilitate progress in the disabled community. My primary goal is that the technology I create will be not only usable by all but able to be enjoyed by all. Being disabled was not a challenge I expected in life, but it has galvanized me to take on ableism with an intersectional mindset, a willingness to listen, and the knowledge that my work will be appreciated by those who need it most.

In the fall of 2018, my senior year of high school was disrupted by my mental health. A cascade of isolated events resulted in my admission to a residential hospital for OCD and anxiety from March to June of 2019. Due to my stay, I was unable to attend my senior prom and participate in many traditions central to senior year. While I was able to attend my graduation, missing almost the entire second semester negatively affected my ability to continue the friendships I had in high school. Originally, I had planned to attend an East Coast college, but my mental health restricted my choices to schools within Wisconsin. Still desiring to work one-on-one with professors, I enrolled at Ripon College, a small liberal arts school just over an hour from home. I had no desire to get lost in a large university. In addition to my mental health concerns, I had been diagnosed with a debilitating neurological disorder called POTS in the time between my release from the hospital and my entry into college. In some ways, my freshman year in fall 2019 was easier than I expected. I was meeting new people and learning new things about myself every day. Early on, a large gender question mark formed above my head and led to challenges I didn't foresee. In the early days of undergrad, I still went by my dead name. However, I was growing uncomfortable with the idea that I was perceived as a woman. I used they/them pronouns and described my identity as genderqueer. During my first semester of college, the people on my floor formed a solid group of friends. The bond we had grew tight as fall turned into winter, but it unraveled by the entrance of rush week in the spring. Around half the kids at my college participate in Greek life each year, and its presence was unavoidable around the campus. Due to the lingering challenges of my mental disorders and my inability to stand for long periods due to POTS, weekend parties and Greek life events were not accessible options, even if I had found them appealing. However, as a nonbinary student, I was barred from joining and I found that hurtful. While it was somewhat gender affirming that the sororities did not consider me enough of a woman to allow me to join, it felt very isolating to be one of the only students in my social bubble who didn't get socialized with by upperclassmen recruiters. Now that I've graduated college and have plans to head towards grad school, I am able to clearly define what I enjoyed and did not enjoy about my undergrad experience. While a small, intimate campus was the right choice for me, it also limited how many people I could meet. Specifically, it limited the number of people I could meet who shared my background of being LGBTQ+ and disabled. It is very important to me that my graduate school allows me to facilitate progress in the disabled community. As a person with mental, physical, and neurological disabilities who intends to pioneer accessible technology, I find it crucial to be able to put in work where it is needed most. With my history of being excluded from social events due to ableism and transphobia, my goal moving forward is to promote intersectional acceptance in everything I do and work towards a world where diverse, underrepresented communities have access to the fullest and most unlimited experiences.

My experiences facing ableism as a neurodivergent ambulatory wheelchair user have galvanized me to pursue a career in the design and development of accessible technology. This fall at Rochester Institute of Technology, I will be pursuing a Master of Science in Human-Computer Interaction with a specialization in accessibility and inclusion research. Human-computer interaction is the study of how we as humans use technology and how we can make it easier to use. My goal is to identify ableism in software and to work to eliminate it. There are three main ways in which I will accomplish my goal. First of all, I will uplift the disabled community that surrounds me at RIT by learning American Sign Language. Second, I will approach every challenge with an intersectional mindset and a willingness to listen. And finally, I will hold all of my creations to the standard that they are not only usable by all, but enjoyable by all.