I started a new university for Fall 2014 and I am absolutely loving it. My experience with my new school has shown me the truly atrocious behavior exhibited by the old one. My previous school essentially left me fending for myself and I felt isolated during the orientation and educational settings. To make a long story short, my hopes dwindled and the last straw was when they told me I should read lips during a video phone call assignment. Reading lips on a screen is not sufficient nor identical to reading the lips off a computer screen. To hearing people who have never encountered other d/Deaf people, their "read their lips" may seem perfectly rational. But for me that was the proverbial straw. I shouldn't have been surprised my nursing school was a horrible experience. This is the same school whose deaf and HOH accommodations employee told me Deaf people cannot learn foreign languages because we can't hear it. There were other issues at the former school with unreliable accommodations, but that comment has been burned to memory and that employee was never reprimanded for that comment because she "didn't remember saying that. She must have misheard what I said." I had hoped the medical campus would have been proactive about accommodations but that was not the experience I had. I'm giving the benefit of the doubt that my teachers didn't deliberately put up roadblocks, but in the end, someone doesn't need to be malicious to make things difficult for others. From what information was given to me by other students during my time there is a HOH medical student who reads lips during lectures. Is that truly what that student wants, or are they unaware they could have real-time captioning provided for them? Who knows, maybe they just don't want their classmates wrongly singling them out as intellectually inferior. Just because someone didn't know the exact words you said doesn't mean they're incapable of understanding you.
In related news, I decided to wait until next summer to apply to veterinary schools. One of my main hurdles is being able to trust that other schools would provide the classroom lecture accommodations. At this point I believe my new school's veterinary college would do well based on how this semester has been proceeding and because they had a Deaf student years ago who used an ASL interpreter. The other hurdle I have is I am not a traditional student and I'm older, but I'm trying to remind myself that any career I have, I'm mostly likely going to be doing it until I'm 70 or older! So I'm not truly too old for vet school, I'll simply be the oldest student in my class.
