1 Chapter 1: Words of Wisdom: Learn What You Don’t Want
1 Chapter 1: Words of Wisdom: Learn What You Don’t Want
Chapter 1: Words of Wisdom: Learn What You Don’t Want
Michael Duggan & Jamie Edwards
Michael Duggan (in the center)
When I was in college I was incredibly lost on what I wanted to do. I was originally a music major–jazz music to be specific. I grew up for most of my childhood playing different instruments. At age 3 I was playing the piano and organ, in high school I played most anything brass (trombone, trumpet, baritone, etc.) and also really developed a passion for jazz improvisation. Music performance only seemed like a logical progression. In my freshman year however, I soon discovered that is one is to be successful in the music industry, they need to be practicing many, many hours a day. While I enjoyed performing, this is something I lacked the patience or interest to do. This left me at the end of my first year feeling very disheartened and concerned for my future.
In my sophomore year I took a random Anthropology course as a General Education requirement where we studied among many other things, the Deaf culture and other disability subcultures. I found this fascinating. Growing up I had volunteered with organizations like Special Olympics as I had people with disabilities in my family, but I did not realize there were academic studies on the topic. I wanted to develop a deeper understanding, so as a project for the course I conducted an Anthropological study where I staged a fake car accident and lived in a wheelchair for two weeks. I wanted to better understand the disability experience first-hand. In addition, I interviewed a person with a disability each night to broaden my knowledge. I tried to cover as many disability groups as I could–blindness, Deafness, autism, mental illness, learning disabilities, and cerebral palsy to name a few.
My experience learning first-hand being in a wheelchair, plus my learning from interviewing other people was a truly transformational experience. I found my favorite restaurants to be poorly accessible, public transportation mind boggling, and the way people treated me drastically different. I also found from my interviews that different types of discrimination and access issues were prevalent for every diagnosis–certainly it took different forms for each person, but the theme was always one of frustration and inaccessibility. After this experience, I decided I wanted to understand things on a deeper level, and discovered there was an entire academic discipline dedicated towards this type of research–it was called Rehabilitation Counseling.
So I changed my major, dropped all my music courses and started piling up on social sciences–psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science and more. I eventually earned my Bachelors degree and then moved unto graduate school earning my Masters in Rehabilitation Counseling. I was lucky enough to earn a Graduate Assistantship at my university where I worked at the schools Office of Disability Accessibi