Rebecca Alexander

Rebecca Alexander, a psychotherapist and spin instructor in New York City, was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan when she was diagnosed with Usher syndrome, a condition that causes hearing and vision loss.

“I think about college as the best years of my life, and yet I remember really having a difficult time coming to terms with the fact that I was progressively losing my vision and hearing and that I didn’t know at what rate that would happen,” she said.

In addition to her American Culture and Ethnic Studies major, Rebecca took advantage of the university’s pilot course in American Sign Language, a class that not only helped her feel proactive about managing her diagnosis, but that would prove crucial to her time working at a school for the deaf after graduate school. She turned down a full ride to graduate school at UCLA because she knew she couldn’t stay in Los Angeles, instead going to Columbia University to complete master’s degrees in public health and social work at the same time.

“As a visually impaired person, at the time I was still driving only during the day,” she said. “I felt very isolated and I kind of felt like Cinderella at night. As soon as it got dark out, I’d have to run home. And I couldn’t really do that much independently. So I decided that Los Angeles was not the right place for me to stay in. That was a hugely difficult decision because why not go to a school where I come out and I have no debt? But I did not think that my emotional well-being was worth taking that risk.”

After Rebecca graduated, she found a social work position in a school for the deaf in Brooklyn. She had not used ASL since college. “It just sounded like the job for me. There was nothing I wanted to do more but to practice my sign and to get better at sign,” she said. She spent two years at the school. “It was such an amazing experience,” she said. “It was really just a wonderful experience. I knew that it wasn’t something I was gonna be doing for the rest of my life, but I knew that I was also helping people, I was working in a community that was very encouraging, and [we] were really a close-knit community, as the deaf community generally is.”

Highlights

Picking a major: Oftentimes, as undergrads we sort of stumble upon our major based on the classes we take. You start taking classes that you are required to take, and then you move on to take classes that look interesting to you. That was really how I decided to pursue my college career. I looked for classes that were interesting to me, that I felt like I would really want to be engaged in.

Teaching a women’s health class in prison while an undergrad: I think that [the class] was one of the many steppingstones for where I am now. It sort of solidified my desire to want to be in some form of profession where I felt at the end of the day like I was doing something that mattered. And I knew all along that I wanted to do something where I felt like I was either giving back to the community or where somebody was benefitting from the work I was doing in some way to make their lives better.

Connecting with the community at the school for the deaf: For me, becoming a hearing-impaired person, part of what was so difficult about it was being raised as a hearing person and then becoming less hearing. I didn’t really feel like I was a hearing person, and yet I wasn’t a deaf person. I was somewhere in between. And that was very isolating. I felt very lonely in that space. So to go to a community that was deaf, and there were a lot of hard of hearing people there, and also hearing people, but for everybody to be on the same level in terms of communicating...it was so necessary to me given my circumstances to be in a community where I really felt like I belonged.

Picking a career: It’s so hard to go against the grain of the messages that you receive from your family, the things that you think in your mind that you should be doing as you become a professional. But I think that the only way to get where you want to be is to pursue the things that genuinely interest you and that you really feel are important in life.