Envision Your Future with the College Success Program

Originally presented on March 21, 2022

by Mary K. Alexander, Senior Director for Vocational Rehabilitation and Programs and Director of the College Success Program at Envision, and Preston Radtke, College Success Program Mentor

Envision’s College Success Program is an all-virtual, holistic support system that helps guide students as they transition from high school to college, with the goal of completing their academic programs, graduating, and attaining professional employment. The CSP engages students through online resources, events, mentorship, and more, all at no cost to them. CSP content covers everything from preparing for college to communicating with professors, from O&M on campus to socializing, from writing resumes to networking and interviewing. At the forefront of the CSP is mentorship. The CSP has a strong team of Mentors who are available to partner with students as they navigate their college journey and beyond. All CSP Mentors are recent college graduates who are blind or have low vision and have a wealth of knowledge from their own college and job-hunting experiences that they can share with students. All CSP Mentors are recent college graduates who are blind or have low vision and have a wealth of knowledge from their own college and job-hunting experiences that they can share with students. Join us on March 21 to learn and further engage with the exceptional mentoring initiatives of Envision’s College Success Program. Hear firsthand from mentors and mentees as they share out personal insights and successes.

Transcript

Mary

We’re really honored to be asked by Lighthouse Guild to speak to y’all again, we love talking to the group. If it’s okay with y’all, I’m going to share my screen.  I have a PowerPoint, that is something that I’m going to share with Maggie so that she will have it available and can send out to whoever has joined the call as well if y’all want her to, after the call, obviously.

I am very descriptive when I do my presentations, because I understand that not everybody can see our screen. So, if you’ll bear with me just a second, I will start our show.

So, the College Success Program began many years ago. We started with some research that was done in 2013. The research was something that was really helpful for us because we knew the need, which was that college students who have any type of vision loss graduate at a much lower level than their typically sighted peers. If they do complete college, only about 44% of them were finding employment versus many of their sighted peers finding employment, a lot of times right away after college. And that’s not the case for students with vision loss. 68% of people born with vision loss in the past 25 years, also have additional disabilities. Multiple disabilities are not uncommon now.

But, we have a a lot of TVIs throughout the country that were educated at a time when that was not typical. So, that’s something that they have had to really get a lot of knowledge about. They also usually have huge caseloads. If any of the students that are on the call know that if they had a TVI, they were not that TVI’s only students. The TVIs generally see students in K through 12 or until age 21 or 22. They will have all types of vision loss. And they’ll use all types of technology. A TVI has to know all of it, or at least know some parts, or figure it out year after year after year, because it’s changing all the time for them.

Technology for students with vision loss is very expensive. And so it does raise the cost of education. And that’s something that is not well known or really even talked about but it’s a real issue.

When we did the research, we developed four specific findings. These are not going to be of any surprise to a parent that’s on the call or if you are a professional in the field, you’ll know these things. I’m a parent, and I also work in this field and they weren’t particularly surprising to me. The level at which we’re finding them, and students that are already in college was kind of surprising to me. Students that go to college need to arrive at college already prepared to speak for themselves, to be able to discuss their own learning, how they learn what their vision loss is like and why their learning is different from sighted peers. They need to understand about helping make yourself a more social person because isolation for BVI students is really, really rampant, both in the classroom as well as just socially. Then, they need to know what kind of technology is best and when to use it.

But the biggest finding, and the one that we find ourselves addressing over and over again as we work with students in the program, is the difference between the laws that govern you in college, versus what governs you when you were in K through 12. So it’s IDEA which is the law that covers you in K through 12, requires that a school go out and make sure that you’re getting services. The ADA or the Americans with Disabilities Act, is what covers a student once they’re in college. It’s important to know that this does not require the college to go out and find, and make sure that your student is getting the services that they need.  It requires a student to self-identify, and to ask for the things that they need. And that’s a huge difference for most students.

At the College Success program, as we were building the program, we put a lot of time and thought into what a really prepared student who is blind or has low vision, what do they look like? And so, the slide that is on the screen now is basically a pie chart. And there are different pieces of the pie that are colored differently. And each piece of the pie is a piece of what being prepared would be. So the first piece is having access to accessible materials, textbooks and the materials that a college professor would display on a screen. All of that is important, no matter if it’s on your syllabus or not. If the professor talks about it, and discusses it, and it will be required on a test, you need to know it and you need to have access to that material.

So, there’s a variety of ways that students do that. I know that, you know, Preston was a successful college student and has a great job now, but he had to figure all of this out for himself as well. I hope that he’ll talk a little bit about that, about how he got his textbooks. What that looked like for him, what were some of the challenges for him.

All students have to know how to use assistive technology effectively, that’s another pie slice. The next one is that a student can advocate for themselves in school. This is really important. You won’t have a TVI or a parent to speak for you, so practicing that ability to talk about yourself and how you learn, talk about what you need to be a successful student and, basically practicing how to address a professor or someone in the disability service office, or even a peer about what possible assistance or accommodation they can provide for you. It doesn’t always have to be your professor. So, the person sitting next to you in class might be your best source of notes for the class, especially if your professor is one who is not really great at making things accessible to you. And that’s a fact of life and in most college programs, is that you figure out very quickly who you can depend and rely upon.

The next pie piece is resilience. All fully-prepared college students are resilient. They have been told no countless times, they bounce back. They don’t take it personally, and they just keep moving. You have to practice that. When you’ve never had a failure or something happen in your life that someone told you “no,” how do you prepare yourself for when that happens? I hope that the students on the call are not adults before they ever hear the word no, because it’s really hard to gain resilience once you’re an adult. 

Students also need to be very confident in their learning. The next pie slice is about understanding what you need and when you need it. The next slice is about using your network to become successful or to achieve. When you think about networks, as a professional, I have a network that is on this really cool online platform called LinkedIn. And I rely on them because I use this network to push out thoughts and ideas or to make requests. In college, you’re doing the same thing. Your network may or may not be online, but using the systems that are in place to help you achieve; like the Disability Service office system, your VR agency system, if you have a counselor, if you have an AT trainer, be sure that you understand what those people can do for you and use them in a way that best supports you.

The next pie slice is that you have people that support you and your learning. This can be anyone from your parents, your TVI that you have in high school that you want to stay friends with as you get older, your VR counselor. It could also be an advocacy program like the NFB or the ACB, your local state chapter of either of those, and using those people and learning from them is important.

The final slice is about access to the right prep programs. Depending on where you your child is in their preparation, it may be that they need a little extra orientation and mobility to the campus that they’ll be on or that they need orientation and mobility just to be more independent as far as getting around campus, going in and out of stores, buying things in a grocery store and knowing how to find their way around a store, using the technology that’s cropping up right and left it seems like around navigation, and taking advantage of that kind of thing. So, just understanding what the findings from the research were, and then what a really prepared student looked like, we decided that students need help, when they need it. They don’t need to wait for someone to physically come to them, or for them to physically go to a mentor or a resource center somewhere.

So, we decided we wanted to create our program and make it virtual. We’ve been virtual and running since 2016. We have a great website that is collegesuccessbvi.org. But you’ll see that as well, later in this program. When Maggie sends out the PowerPoint, you’ll have that as well. Our resources that are available are basically a curriculum. It has a lot of different ways that you can take in that knowledge, some really, really engaging webinars, we have some engaging, acted-out plays that are within our curriculum. I think that each piece of our curriculum follows around some tenet of where students have challenges in going to college. We have a lot of resources about orientation and mobility, about advocacy, about talking to your professor, about being socially isolated in college, how to make friends, I mean, that’s honestly one of our resources. It’s something that if you’re that student who finds it very hard to walk up and talk to people, without them coming up to you first, I think it would be a good resource for you.

We have three pieces, or three parts to our program, the resources are one. Mentorship, which I think Preston would agree with, is probably the most important part of our program. We actually currently have 21 mentors, that number fluctuates depending on how many we need. Also, as our mentors go on and find really great jobs, sometimes they don’t have the time to be a mentor any longer, so we do change on that periodically. This year, we’re serving about 120 students all over the country. Our mentors are all over the country, and so are our students. Everything is virtual with the mentors. The student and the mentor are matched according to the type of vision loss because that’ll correlate a lot of times with the technology. But we want to be sure that students are supported in whatever way they need. So, that’s going to be the primary way that we match students with a mentor. Then the student and the mentor will schedule their own appointments as far as making a phone call and talking for an hour, a couple of times a month, or more if it’s needed.

We also have a community that we have built, and it’s growing and is becoming pretty robust now. We do monthly webinars through our website. But we also do webinars like this one that we’ve been invited to do. We do twice weekly student meetups, which is sort of like if you think about a college student union. We just want a place where students can come. This is run by mentors, and it’s a safe space for mentors and students to be able to talk. Over the entire program, though, we’ve always kept students at the center. We’ve served approximately 2,500 students since the beginning of the program. And we’re currently at about 1,500 just this year, as far as active students. If we have 1,500 active students, but only 120 of them are being mentored, you can see that we allow our students to come and use our program in the way that seems right for them. We would definitely love to be able to provide a mentor to every student who’s in our program, but they don’t all ask for it, and so that’s important.

The best part of our program is our mentors. This is where I’d like Preston to step in and to talk just a little bit about what he does as a mentor. And how he thinks this has helped students, and if he could have used a program like this. I usually hear from mentors that they could have, but there’s always that one person who was perfect and might not have needed a mentor.

Real quickly, the requirements to be a mentor is they need to have already finished college with a bachelor’s degree or greater. They need to excel in those areas that we find our students have the most need, that we’ve already talked about. They need to be compassionate, but also passionate about helping our students. On the PowerPoint you’ll see that there’s a link so that you can look at the mentor bios on our website. You can easily just go to the site and find it as well.

A lot of our mentors have gone on and do pretty cool things. We’re very happy if our mentors find fulfilling employment, even if they can’t work with us any longer, that’s fine. There are always new students coming up. We have some mentors that have done some pretty cool, interesting things. I’m going to add Preston to this list now because he has a very cool job at Zoom. Preston, do you want to talk just a little bit about what being a mentor is done for you?

Preston

Do you want me to talk for a few then turn it back over to you or turn it back to Maggie when I’m done?

Mary

Talk for a few minutes, and then I’ll finish out my presentation. Yeah, if you don’t mind, and then we’ll take questions.

Preston

Great. Hi, everyone. My name is Preston, one of the one of the College Success mentors, here with Envision. Speaking personally, when I was in college, I was fortunate to have a mentor, someone else who was blind. He was not a student, he was someone who was gainfully employed in the workforce. He basically acted like my own college success mentor. I’d come to him whenever I had questions about anything regarding blindness or being in college, be it how to communicate with my professors, how to get around social anxieties that are associated with having a disability, and even how to learn how to use different forms of assistive technology and how to go about finding my textbooks.

So, to kind of address a question that Mary asked earlier, when I was in college, I went about acquiring my textbooks by researching if they were available on Bookshare, or RFB&D or I would work with my college’s Adaptive Technology Lab where they would convert physical textbooks into accessible formats.

So, speaking as a mentor, I mentor about four students right now. It’s very inspiring to see the growth that some of them have undergone in being a part of the mentorship program, because some of them have come in being very timid, being very unsure of their place in college, or their place in the world as someone with a visual impairment. And allowing them to interface with other successful visually impaired people or just their peers allows them greater perspective and then provides greater options for them.

So, the last thing I want to highlight is, these twice-weekly Mentor Hangouts and Mentee Hangouts. I think these are maybe some of the most important activities that we offer because they’re just unstructured, two-hour sessions where mentors and mentees can just discuss anything under the sun. So, it could be something as formulaic as how do I go about building a PowerPoint on my own? Or something as informal as I need to carry my food tray through the cafeteria with my cane, do you have any suggestions? There’s no structure. We’re not like, tonight we’re talking about PDFs, or tonight we’re talking about cane versus guide dog. We completely let the conversation, and most importantly, the students dictate where that discussion goes. That kind of reinforces this idea of, we meet the students where they are at. So, that could be leading those sorts of discussions, or them dictating how they would want us to work with them and to mentor them. Thank you so much for attending. l’ll be here for any questions once we get to Q&A.

Mary

Preston, I’m going to ask you a couple of questions real quick, if you don’t mind. I’m going to draw a little bit more out of you. Do you mind telling everyone what type of vision loss you have? And if you have any sight.

Preston

I have cone rod dystrophy. So in layman’s terms, I have a little bit of vision on the periphery of my eyes. I have color contrast, and I can make out color contrast and light perception. I can make out certain colors obviously if there’s a good backdrop or silhouette, but it’s not to the point where I could walk without use of a cane or service animal or I wouldn’t be able to recognize people on the street. So, effectively, I am blind, completely blind.

Mary

What’s your primary reading medium?

Preston

Nowadays I mostly just read via screen reader. I do have a braille display. It’s quite old, so it’s kind of falling apart. But before then I used a braille note refreshable braille display. I primarily used that in college.

Mary

Okay. So I’m asking you these things because I’m going around my chart, right.  Asking things and because I know that you can answer them. As far as going through college, was there a time when you thought, “I just don’t think I’m going to make it through,” and you just got really frustrated? Can you tell us how you managed to get through it?

Preston

Yes, unfortunately, it happened kind of later on in my college career. It happened when I was through my first semester of grad school. I should have gotten that out of the way earlier. I had my heart set on working. This is kind of ironic what I do now, but at the time, I had my heart set on being kind of like a technical program manager. I was taking all these kinds of IT Engineering courses, and it was just not landing. I did not understand at all. It wasn’t because of my visual impairment. The content was really dense and it was basically difficulties that any other student would face. I got through it by communicating with that mentor I mentioned before, and a man who worked in our Disability Services Department. I just said, I’m not enjoying this, I’m not really understanding this, and if this is what I have to do for the rest of my life then I don’t know that I really want to continue taking these classes. Of course, the great irony is that I switched graduate programs to something a lot more creative and I’m basically working in the industry that I was initially in school for when I switched that first semester of grad school. So, the long answer is I kind of navigated that by communicating with my mentors and my support system at my college.

Mary

That’s actually a really good example of one of those ways that you build that grit or resilience is by asking for help from others. Right? So that’s a really good example.

Preston

It’s kind of a balancing act, because I think a lot of college students are told throughout their lives, you know, you have to be independent, you have to do things on your own, don’t try to do things completely independently. And sometimes they fall in the trap of, okay, well, if I have to do everything independently, that means I shouldn’t ask for help, when, in reality, the true sign of independence is being able to recognize when I need help. I can’t do this completely on my own. I can’t do this as effectively on my own and realizing that the better course of action is to ask for help in those instances. Sometimes it’s kind of a tough skill for some students to learn so we try to kind of reinforce that in our interactions with our mentees.

Mary

I think you’re exactly right. And it’s hard when, especially if you’ve never had to ask for help, if things were done for you. That’s something that I’ve seen, where we have a lot of students that had wonderful programs in K through 12 and they were highly supported. But they were so supported, that possibly they didn’t gain some of those skills that they needed to, and that’s hard. It’s a lot more work if you have to develop them later. And I know as a parent, I don’t know if your parents would say the same Preston, but starting at age 10, is when they start transition discussions in Texas. I was just clueless about why this is so important? You know, it just seemed like one more thing we had to add to our daily lives where we were so busy, especially if you have other children. So, making it clearer to parents about why transition is really important and the things that need to happen during that time and not using academic language. That’s something that we’ve tried to nix in our program is we want student-centered language and language that is going to make sense to the families and so hopefully, we have gotten that done.

I’m going to put in the chat screen our website address so that if anybody wants it earlier, rather than later, you can have it. The last thing I wanted to talk about in this presentation was, we have this great program, how do we pay for it? And it’s something that I don’t think nonprofits talk enough about to the people that they serve. But you know, everything costs money, right? We have staff that we pay, and we pay our mentors. And I think that because we have very high expectations of what our mentors are doing, and we expect them to be professionals, they should be compensated for what they do. So it’s important to us that that be the case. The way that we pay for our program is we don’t charge students, but we do go to the states where students live and ask their VR agencies to support them, or us, in making this program possible. To be a sustainable program, as Lighthouse Guild would tell you, you have to have funding from people who understand what’s going on, and who believe in what you’re doing. And so that’s what we do. So if you have ideas for us as far as your state VR agency, if your VR counselor might be interested, send us the information and we’d be glad to follow up on it. It’s what we do every single day.