ENGL1102 History Projects: The Starting Days of the AIMSS Program

The AIMSS started the program with two students. One of the students was a student in the college of education in their courses and professors knew that she needed some help so they came to AIMSS, and the other student applied to the University and his mother contacted AIMSS, and so they started so they had the two students and one graduate assistant from the college of education to help mentor those students

Julie said if she could go back in time and change something for when the program first started, she would start by bringing in visuals with different backgrounds and perspectives. They did ask individuals from the community and for Marshall University, how to get started, and that was very helpful. However, it would’ve been helpful to have individuals who had background in social work and mental health because many of their students Seek resources beyond the academic resources that they first started with. For example, when they first started, they had some students who benefited from a psychologist who came to campus but if they had thought about those issues ahead of time, they might’ve been more prepared.

So they were able to get a mentor one mentor for the program because the dean at the time so they had mentors for the college about it. She was willing to give them one of those positions. They also had fees for the program so we were able to pay the mentor stipend from the fees that students pay. 

So when they started the program they dreamed for five years and made a plan for that. First they wanted to add a part-time coordinator with 7 to 8 students over a couple of years. And then their goal was to get up to 15 students and have a full-time coordinator. They wanted to make sure that we could mentor students to help with any individual challenges that they faced. They also wanted to help them be able to get jobs after college. Our long-term dream was to work with high school teachers to help them understand how to prepare our students before they made it to college so they would be more successful.

So after they decided that they wanted to start a program, they weren’t sure but people in the community who worked with individuals with autism called Julie, and said we think you should start a program so after we were able to get the mentor in the program, they contacted the people at Marshall University and they came up and showed us all the paperwork. Let us use is also put their name on it so that’s how they got our applications and then the criteria and then they also came up and trained everybody in housing so all the RAs on how to work you know what the characteristics of individual of autism and how to help and we had an opportunity for all the staff and faculty to come to a training and so it was like a half day training we had lunch we had food and everything and then we worked with the individual who was in accessibility services at the time Amy Snively to connect accessibility services to the age program so they were on board. They talked to lots of people around campus to prepare to have the structure in place and then we had to talk to professors about why they were emailing them about students and that was OK because professors worry about confidentiality of course because I’m not supposed to talk to anybody else about the students without permission for the student so we had to get a form approved for that and let them know it was sent that so they knew that it was OK with a student. They talked  to them and got them by board and all those kinds of Things so we had lots of papers. They actually had what was called discovery group instead of an AIMSS class because it was a optional activity. They didn’t have a credit too. It was just once a week kind of like a club and all but it didn’t go too well because we had two students one who hated art and one that loved computer, science, national security, all that stuff the other topics like that.