Stephen Holmberg '01 is an engineering modified with economics major, he spent a summer doing fiberoptic research with NASA, he plays varsity squash, he is a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity and he has a learning disability.
For Holmberg, who was diagnosed with dyslexia in third grade, his disability is a part of his identity.
"I would not be the person here today without being learning disabled, but I would not wish it on my worst enemy," he said.
Like many of the students at Dartmouth with learning disabilities, Holmberg said he has been forced to work hard to compensate for the way he learns.
According to Student Disabilities Coordinator Nancy Pompian, students like Holmberg are not alone at Dartmouth. She said there are currently 83 reported cases of learning disabilities and/or attention deficit disorder at the College. In the past, there have been up to 120 reported cases.
Pompian said the most common disabilities at the College are dyslexia, auditory processing deficits, math learning disabilities and disorder of written expression. These disabilities often affect students' ability to complete their work and perform well in tests.
But Dartmouth professors and the academic skills center work together to make the college experience as pain free as possible for students who suffer with learning disabilities, Pompian said.
Pompian said some students at Dartmouth, like Holmberg, were diagnosed with learning disabilities during elementary or high school, while others were not diagnosed until later in their lives.
One senior told The Dartmouth that he took German for three years in high school and did well overall. But when he took his first Spanish class during his Sophomore summer, he realized that he had a problem.
"I couldn't even pass the first test we took in Spanish," he said. "I was spending like maybe seven hours a day on my Spanish and I was still failing it."
But it was the Rassias method of drilling students that gave this student -- and many others like him at Dartmouth -- the most trouble.
"I couldn't ever get anything in drill," he said. "The drill instructor would call on me and I just couldn't answer it."
He said he had to ask the instructor up to five times before he would be able to reply.
"He felt so guilty calling on me that he stopped calling on me after the first week," the student said.
According to Pompian, the Rassias method of teaching foreign languages is the biggest problem for students with learning disabilities here at Dartmouth. She pointed out that students who have trouble with math can get around their requirements, but there is a College-wide requirement for languages.
After getting a referral from his professor and being tested, he learned that he has a disability that is similar to ADD, which limits his auditory processing skills.
"I always knew I had a learning disability once I got into the kind of work that involved a lot of time and effort," he said. "I think I just spend a lot more time doing my work than everyone else."
Since he was diagnosed, the student has been able to compensate for his disability by meeting with his professors to discuss his abilities, as well as getting extra help in the form of time extensions on tests and decreased reading loads.
He said he has also worked with a voice to text program that allows him to train a computer to recognize his voice and then dictate his written assignments into a microphone. Students with disabilities can sign this technology out in Baker library.
When asked if he feels like he is in the minority at Dartmouth, he said, "Well, I'm not a minority in the sense that it's something readily identifiable by the rest of the community. I'm also a Native American. Just being that, it's so much more obvious that you're a minority. But a learning disability is for the most part invisible."
Both this senior and Holmberg agreed that Dartmouth professors and the Academic Skills Center have been very accepting and helpful to them as they have grappled with learning disabilities throughout their times at the College.
However, Holmberg said that occasionally his peers do not understand his problem.
"A lot of people feel that [double time on exams] is extra," he said. "But it's not an extra benefit. It basically brings me to the same playing field that everyone else is on. It equalizes me."
Will Walker '01 is also affected by a learning disability, but unlike the two aforementioned students, he is 42 years old.
Walker said before he ended up at Dartmouth he dropped out of college in the mid 1970s and worked as a surgical technician in a hospital, ran a business in Colorado and worked in construction.
Two years ago, he returned to school at a community college in Kansas, and he said right away his professors picked up on his problem.
"I'm old enough that I slipped through the cracks," he said. "But all of a sudden, teachers started saying 'Hey, get tested.'"
It turned out that Walker's lifelong academic difficulties had stemmed from an undiagnosed learning disability that affected his visual and auditory senses as well as his spatial perceptions.
He said he has found Dartmouth's support system for learning disabled students to be very accommodating in his time here so far.
"I think the biggest thing was, for the majority of my life, I was viewed as just a lousy student, as lazy," he said. "Finding out that I had a learning disability gave me more confidence."
He said he was self conscious at first when he was at Dartmouth because of his learning disability and the fact that he is older than the majority of students here, but he said "It's just not one of those things I'm worried about now because I'm getting an education."
Pompian said Dartmouth has been accommodating students with learning disabilities since 1985 when she assumed the position she now holds.
She said she remembers a time before that when people would come to the Academic Skills Center, asking if there were special tutors available for dyslexics. After Dartmouth started implementing programs to assist its students who suffered from learning disabilities, she said some faculty members said these students probably should not be at the College.
However, she said now the faculty and the administration is fully accepting of disabilities that face the students here, especially because learning disabled students have often been campus leaders -- both in academics and extracurriculars.
According to Pompian, Dartmouth is planning to hold a conference in the near future for the professors here to teach professors about techniques for teaching learning disabled students.
