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How do aspiring chemists with disabilities fare at university, and where can they get support? Helen Carmichael talks to staff and students at one university to find out
According to Robin Perutz, professor of chemistry at the University of York, ‘one of the biggest issues for students with disabilities is that they are not aware of the support they can access’. Students often ‘think wrongly that they will be discriminated against in their applications, so they don’t declare [their disabilities] on the application form,’ he adds. ‘They think it will impact their chances – it won’t.’ But can you do a chemistry degree with any disability? ‘For almost all problems you might encounter, the answer is yes,’ assures Perutz.
Perutz is a member of the UK’s Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) disability committee. With representatives from the Royal Society, Royal Society of Chemistry, Institute of Physics, Society of Biology, and Royal Academy of Engineering, the committee provides support for actual and aspiring students with disabilities, their teachers, and disabled workers in Stem.
About 8% of the UK’s science graduates are students with disabilities. And crunching the numbers, there’s no evidence that disabilities are a factor in whether students choose science subjects, either at university or at secondary school – students with disabilities account for about the same proportion of science and non-science subject populations. York’s department of chemistry is in line with these figures, although the number of disabled students varies considerably from one year to the next.
This article provides a link to the article in Chemistry World.
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