College Connections


New Group Builds Social and Communication Skills for Terps With Autism
by Chris Carroll | photo by John T. Consoli '86 | illustration by Margaret Hall Overwhelmed by the demands of college life, David Rolf ’17 repeatedly froze in his tracks while walking to class, as other students quizzically diverted around him. Another Maryland student who tried to hand in a required form to a professor became so flummoxed when told to give it to a teaching assistant that he stuffed it in his bag and forgot about it. A third, unable to cope with schedule variations, repeated the times and days of upcoming tests from morning to night so he wouldn’t forget. Welcome to the daily struggles of Terps on the autism spectrum. As intelligent as any other UMD students, they live with a neurological condition that creates varying degrees of difficulty in verbal and nonverbal communication, social interaction and sensory processing. Now, a new campus organization—the Social Interaction Group Network for Students with Autism (SIGNA)—is helping them develop the skills to successfully negotiate higher education. SIGNA started the fall semester with just four participants out of 19 self-identified students with autism on campus—and likely a much larger number of students on the spectrum who haven’t come forward. Kathy Dow-Burger, an assistant clinical professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences (HESP) developed the SIGNA program and oversees the group. “There are a lot of misconceptions about people with autism, but they want the same things everyone else does,” says Dow-Burger, associate director of the University of Maryland Autism Research Consortium (UMARC). “These guys want friends, they want girlfriends, they want to do well in school and get jobs.” But autism spectrum disorder often makes it tough to maintain normal connections to both peers and instructors, while planning and organization are far bigger hurdles than for typical students. For Rolf, a computer science major with a serious yet friendly demeanor, the stress of mounting academic requirements caused reactions he couldn’t control.
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