I wanted to go to grad school for spite. Because I had these undiagnosed learning disabilities that I didn't receive my diagnoses until grad school. I had a lot of roadblocks in high school where I was basically told you're not going to graduate from high school. You're not going to make it. I thought to myself, “No, I can.” The structure in place isn't working for people like me, and I did graduate, and I did go to university, and I thought I wanted to do nonprofit work. I took a disability studies class, and that changed everything for me. I learned there is a whole community of people who are like me, people who are different from me, but we share this political and cultural identity. There is a disability culture that can be really rewarding and life-saving, and I mean that very literally, for so many people. I thought to myself, I'm really interested in these narratives of disability. I want to study autoethnography and disability, and I tried that out and it wasn't working for me. I knew I wanted this focus on disability and culture, then media studies made sense. I was trained in critical cultural critique of representation and popular culture, how is disability shown in regards with its connections with race, class, and gender. This is my issue with critical cultural critique, it sometimes just ends there, and I want more. We know that here's a problem, how do we interrupt it, because it's impacting even people who are not necessarily part of disability communities. Ableism impacts all of us. I ended up at McMaster, thanks to my master's supervisor, Rachel Dubrofsky, who told me if you want to do the work you want to do, you should go to Canada, because, as Paula mentioned, it's really interdisciplinary and very collaborative. I ended up at McMaster and working in Paula's lab. That experience of first as a research assistant user centered design, and then later as now the lab’s project manager, that changed everything for me. Learning how to work together and collaborate with people in different disciplines, sometimes there's friction. When we are trying to build access and build better worlds, sometimes based on who we are, and how we conceive of what that better world is, we're gonna have some friction, or we're not going to reach that point at the same time, or we'll have different needs to reach that point, but there's beauty in that. I completed a fellowship through NSERC, which is Canada's equivalent of the National Science Foundation, in an interdisciplinary training program for designing assistive technologies and AI for older adults. That was really enlightening. Getting to work with students who are trained in biomedical engineering. Paula mentioned co-design, and a lot of times co-design follows that top-down thinking. It's what the researcher wants, but I think what I really learned from being in her lab and collaborating with stakeholders and collaborators on, and beneficiaries on these projects, is considering how we can use our position and our resources to help people meet the goals that they want for providing access or comfort or care. Entering the field or the fields that I'm in at this time is really exciting because that work is already foundationed.