High School and beyond
“My son Vineet is a senior in high school, and has an intellectual disability. For our family, our dream is that both of our boys find a career each is passionate about.
Vineet has always been very passionate about clothing from very young age, has a great color coordination sense and has always chosen clothes for himself. He loves to change outfits a couple of times a day (he has a huge laundry pile everydayL) and has a great style of his own. He loves to spend time in the clothing section at shopping malls. This made me wonder if he should be exposed to the fashion industry.
So I was looking around on the internet for different opportunities and camps, and I landed on the Design and Access program by the University of Cincinnati. (UC DAAP). They had many different summer camps and I was attracted to the “Art of fashion camp”. Finding one’s career requires early exposure to that field, like if a high schooler is deciding on a career in medicine they start by volunteering in hospitals to see if they really like being around patients, blood, stitches, etc. We wanted this same experience for Vineet. To see if he really likes fashion, understand what fashion is and the different aspects of fashion such as designing, sewing, cutting, measuring and modelling.
We emailed the DAAP programs to see if he could attend their summer camp which is for typical high schoolers and without any hesitation they enrolled him into the camp. They were constantly in touch with us to make the camp very successful for Vineet and I think he was one of 200 campers attending DAAP camps from all over the world. Vineet loved this opportunity, he got exposed to a lot of different things about fashion and had a wonderful week and made good friends. He said he really enjoyed “modelling” which was the last segment of the camp. The staff were very happy to spend their week with Vineet.”
Nithya