Sometime this last week I got an email from Stanford's Office of Accessible Education, with which I've worked for the entirety of my Stanford days for academic and extracurricular accommodations, mostly including sign language interpreters. My Oxford video was up! You can view it here:
http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/oae/study-abroad
After I studied abroad in Oxford two years ago, the OAE approached me about helping to make a video about my overseas experiences as a student with a disability. (It sounds like they've been going about revamping how Stanford thinks about its overseas studies programs for students with disabilities, which I will say - aided by my personal experience - is a very good thing.) I helped to film this video probably a year ago, or even a year and a half; I can't really remember. Long enough that I'd almost forgotten about it by the time I saw it this past week. All the photos are mine from my travels in the UK, and I must admit that recalling what I saw and what I had to say after I came back made me very, very excited to return, British accents or no! I will approach Oxford the second time around with a preexisting sense of the place, and also preexisting expectations of how I might fit into it, but I also look forward to many new experiences and (hopefully) a few surprises along the way. None of this is to understate how much of a challenge Oxford was the first time around; it wasn't just lovely frigid afternoons in London taking pictures of Buckingham Palace, and I very well remember that. Many more challenges await, but this video (and my own advice to other students, but also in a way to myself) reminds me to anticipate rather than shy away from them.
As I mull over the times ahead and my goals and expectations for Oxford in a number of months, I'll start a series of posts on that topic, but for now it's rather fun to look back on my twenty-year-old, junior-year self wandering through England for the first time...
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