On Accommodations in Graduate School

Soren Lipman – Graduate Student in Chemical Biology (Miller Group) (soren AT berkeley.edu)

The Disabled Students’ Program (DSP) at UC Berkeley supports disabled students and provides necessary accommodations to remove barriers to education. Up to 27% of adults in the U.S. experience some kind of disability (CDC, May 2023). Whether or not you had accommodations during your undergraduate studies, you can still apply for accommodations at the graduate level. The application process for the DSP can be found here at the DSP website. You will need to provide the DSP with documentation of your disability and schedule an intake appointment. It is best to complete this process as soon as possible, as many students are also requesting accommodations right at the beginning of the school year. When meeting with the graduate student DSP specialist, it is important to come prepared knowing what aspects of the educational system you are facing issues with. The specialist will work with you to determine accommodations that will reduce or eliminate those issues.  

Accommodations can include support for an extension of normative time, extended time on an exam, providing texts in an alternative format such as braille, providing captioned media, and using ASL interpreters, to name a few examples. Accommodations can be applied not only to classes, but to your work in the laboratory and also the qualifying exam – as long as they don’t change the nature of the Ph.D. program. 

Your medical information is held confidential by the DSP and you have control over how your information is shared; in other words, your course instructor, PI, qualifying exam committee, etc., will be notified that you need accommodations if you request them but they won’t be able to see why. 

Accommodations are there to support you. Your experience with disability in graduate school may be different than it was during your undergraduate studies, so it is important to get connected with the DSP early on to make sure that your accommodations are put into place as smoothly as possible.