Originally Posted by
MoAlpha
Took on an undergrad with autism spectrum disorder this summer. I almost returned her after a few meltdowns, but she turned out to be freaking brilliant and fun to have around. We had some interesting conversations about what life, learning to act normal, and maintaining all day, was like for her, i.e., not easy.
We gave her a project using structured equation modeling to make sense of a bunch of functional brain imaging data and she simply killed it. This p.m. she gave about the best undergrad talk I ever heard, in front of at least 100 people, as cool as a cucumber and hitting questions out of the park. I guess talks don't make you nervous when you simply don't deal in the concept of what other people are thinking. Big learning experience for me.
#mentoringdoneright
The field I work in is very competitive and getting into advanced training programs is vet neurology is a long shot, only about 25% of people who want positions actually get them. Program directors tend to choose these cookie cutter types- smart, personable, non-complaining/hard working, sunny. In short: “easy” people. I get it, I want easy too. But sometimes more difficult people have a lot to contribute to the field. Everyone is entitled to their personality IMO. I’ve been arguing lately that we mentors need to open our minds as to what a “good” candidate is.
One of my former interns had me pulling my hair out, has an anxiety disorder and that made things difficult in the clinic sometimes. But we got her placed into a PhD residency, that was 20 years of relationships knowing who’d get her then making the case that they should take her on.
Two years later, I’m sitting at our national meeting when she presents some of her PhD work, she identified the specific defect in genetic disease in dogs. “GM2 Gangliosidosis in Shiba Inu Dogs with an In‐Frame Deletion in HEXB”. Also cool as a cucumber, because she 100% knew her stuff. I’m positive standing up and speaking in front of almost everyone in her field was hugely anxiety provoking for her, but you couldn’t tell one iota. Wow, I almost popped three buttons in 15 min research abstract.
