I had an AMAZING time at IASSIDD!! Even though it wasn’t my first conference, it was my first science conference. It was very different from any conference or convention I’ve been to, but it was definitely one of my favorites.

On the first day, I was overwhelmed by how many presentations there were on each day. I couldn’t decide what presentations I was interested in seeing so I just decided to follow a group and hope for the best.

After experiencing the first day, felt a little more comfortable and I figured out how to navigate myself through the conference. On the remaining days of the conference, I focused on talks about Autism. I was really interested in the research being done with autistic people because I hope to do similar research in the future. As a nerdy autistic person, I got to learn a lot more about the support that I could get in a sciencey way. I do a lot of research related to autism in my free time, but it was really interesting to see different perspectives from people all over the world. Something that I noticed was that a lot of the research was being mostly done on children and adolescents, but the researchers didn’t seem to have people with disabilities in their teams. The researchers meant well, but it would have been nice to see more representation of people with disabilities conducting the research rather than just being the test subjects.

My favorite part of IASSIDD was the Project Ability table. I love art and it was so fun to have my portrait done by one of the artists. Maybe in the future IASSIDD will consider having more presentions done by people with disabilities like the last keynote. I really enjoyed how they finished it off with questions for the audience to answer related to the conference and accessibility. I even participated and said that research being done should be shared on social media because its a better way to have a conversation about this topic without having to be face to face.

I had so much fun at IASSIDD and I’m sad it’s over. I definitely would want to attend another IASSIDD conference.

-Sam Costa