1. How did you deal with differential treatment, if you had to? Or (another way to ask this), do you have any advice for people with disabilities regarding how they handle any kind of differential treatment?
Well, I haven't started school yet, so we'll see. But nonetheless--this is one of the reasons I have left my MDApps up, so that prospectives can see what it might take--I can't help but think that my 100% full disclosure of everything that ails me, from the AMCAS forward, affected my interview yield (number of invites per secondaries complete). I am not saying that Harvard and Yale should be fighting over me, but I can't help but think I would otherwise have gotten more interviews from mid-tier schools. The rest of my dossier is strong. I would even say that the public service chunk of my file can compete with any applicant. 8 interviews is great, but for, what, 41 completed apps? So that's how I dealt, based on last year's results. I applied very, very widely.
As for preempting "differential treatment," I announced straight up, in every single interview, that I want a school where the faculty is behind me. I don't expect, as I said to the interviewers, that every single human at your institution should be thrilled about disabled people in medicine. People disagree. But in the main, I want the faculty behind me, and if I can't find such a program, I'll go back to the lab, or I'll go and practice law.
In my "regular" life I have not been in situations in which differential treatment could gain too much of a foothold. Was dating interesting? Sure. Was middle school phys. ed. interesting? Sure. But before this career switch to medicine, my disabilities were a matter for other people's private opinions and my own cocktail party chitchat (and private struggles). This is the first time disability has intruded into my professional life.
2. If you were on disability (SSDI), how did ADCOMs react to that if they knew? Did they assume that you were incapable of everything at first?
I have never been on SSDI. Though I do have experience advocating for my clients (in social services) to receive other public benefits, I am not an expert in SSDI. My general impression is that it is for people who are unable to enter the regular job market and work a standard job. Again in general, I suspect that this "level" of disability would make a medical career difficult, even with accommodations. With this in mind, though I personally disclosed every single factoid, I would not have mentioned SSDI had it applied to me. One would have to have a hell of a volunteer or literary CV to make up for a missing conventional work history. (Edited to add: as a former humanities person, I mean "literary CV" seriously, not derisively. Let's say there was an SSDI recipient who was able to cast herself as a freelance science writer who hadn't needed to work for a living.)
3. Did you ever struggle to obtain or keep your accommodations (no need to answer unless you want to)? Or, more importantly, do you have experience-based tips for disabled students who do (struggle to keep or obtain accommodations from the school) in the future?
Yes. I do have experience-based tips from my sojourn in a nurse practitioner program. (As Moses sojourned in Midian.) I can answer specific questions over PM for anyone who needs to know. The most diplomatic thing to say about this struggle was that disability was only one of many qualities that made me ill-suited for advanced practice nursing.
Here's one anecdote for the public record, not from nursing school, but from college, ca. 1995-96. (I guess enough water has gone under the bridge since then!) I started college, only 5 years after the ADA was passed, with zero accommodations, and I did not register with the disabilities office, never having done so before. Over the course of the semester, I realized that I needed a piece of equipment in the dorm, something that is found in every U.S. household, but generally not in dorms, costing in the hundreds, not the thousands, of dollars. "Roughing it" and doing without was really wearing on me, and what's more, it wasn't safe.
When I went to my administrative superiors, I encountered a shocking amount of hostility in re: this request. Why had I tried to tough it out? Didn't that mean that I really didn't need the requested accommodation? Wasn't this just a matter of convenience? At length, I prevailed, but this struggle greatly damaged my relationship with the administrators involved. Later in college, when I needed other non-disability-related assistance from them on routine but important matters, I found that my papers were often mislaid. I had to pull strings and get faculty to make calls just to address standard bureaucratic issues, stuff like transcripts.
Moral of the story: get your paperwork in order first and THEN enter a collegial relationship.
IMHO, the problem wasn't that I was disabled...the problem was that I dared to function in the grey area between disabled and non-disabled. A person who starts off on the rolls of the Disabilities Office, volunteers there, is an inspiration and a credit to the institution, great material for a PR piece. A person who is old enough to remember life before the ADA, who is used to making do--my
own father donated money to anti-ADA lobbying groups, fearing that crippled people would soon be taking over his contracting firm--this person is an anomaly and a thorn in the side. Don't be an anomaly.
4. Would you comment on disabilities and LoRs (for residency or medical school)? Do you think there's a need to be concerned that someone (like a professor or committee) would be hesitant to recommend you or anyone because they are "disabled?" Do you have suggestions for handling that?
I plan to handle the residency LoRs just by being better than everyone else in the clinical sphere. This is humor. No, of course I don't
literally mean that I will be better...I mean that I have no choice but to be a lot more than solid. Otherwise there is no way in hell I will match. In nursing school, I learned to start IVs by liberating a bunch of kits and practicing on myself. They could say a lot about ol' samc, but they couldn't criticize my IV technique. The same will have to be true here. I have no choice.
I did forego the committee letter at my postbaccalaureate institution precisely because I didn't know those people and had no clue what they would say about my problems. Not everyone is in a position to dis the committee letter. I did go to an Ivy League school for undergrad and had a close mentoring relationship with my major advisor, who of course gave me a letter. This gave me some socio-intellectual capital, so to speak, to brush off the postbac committee. People can say I worked too much during prereqs, got too many Bs, but no one can say, looking at my file, that I can't get the job done intellectually. Not everyone has this privilege. If I had been compelled to go for the committee letter, I would have been rolling the dice, because there is no guarantee about what actually goes down on paper.
Regarding my faculty letters, I had some help from my lab PI. Our lab has theoretical and wet lab divisions. I was hired to do theoretical work. After last year's unsuccessful cycle, he put me on a physically demanding wet lab project so that he could comment on my physical abilities. (We decided this in advance.)
5. How did you deal with rumors about your disability if you had to? Or (another way of asking), do you have any suggestions about how people should deal with rumors about their disability? For example, coordination disorders can result in rumors that the sufferer is a drunk.
When this has, on occasion, happened, I have usually confronted the rumor-starter directly. I'd rather be unpopular than, in your example above, be taken for a drunk. Over the years I have gotten a LITTLE bit more suave in my approach, but I do anticipate having to bite my tongue a lot in hospital (and other) politics.
