Chapter 14-- "A Career in Advocacy." My name is Marcelle Ciampi, although more people know me by my pen name, Samantha Craft. That is the name I use for my advocacy work and my author name for my books. I was diagnosed almost nine years ago in my early 40s by a psychologist in the Pacific Northwest.

Before that, I saw a counselor who strongly suspected it. My youngest son was diagnosed when he was five. He is now 21, so I've been reading and studying Asperger's and autism since he was four. Doing the math, that's about 17 or 18 years. The first time I suspected it, I was at a Tony Atwood conference. I remember it very distinctly because I was sitting with my longtime childhood best friend whose son is also on the spectrum. Coincidentally, two of my childhood friends both have sons on the spectrum.

When Tony started talking about women on the spectrum, she nudged me. She said, that sounds just like you. So that was the first time the hint of the possibility that I might be on the spectrum was put into my mind. Based on everything I had read up until that point, there wasn't a lot of literature regarding women on the spectrum. It was all oriented towards men.

And there were a lot of stereotypes, misnomers, and falsehoods. This was around 15 years ago, and a lot of what we know today was not well-known back then. Based on that information, I didn't see myself fitting the description. At that point, I let it go for myself and instead focused my energy on my children and homeschooling my middle son on the spectrum.

Down the line, I was pursuing a second master's degree in therapy, and part of the requirement of the program was to seek out counseling. I decided to go see my son's counselor because she was already seeing him for ASD. On either my first or second session with her, I asked if there was the possibility that I could have Asperger's syndrome. Her response was, most definitely. So that's when I started going out and researching it for myself.

"Jumping into Advocacy." To jump ahead, my advocacy work actually kicked off almost nine years ago when I was attending my master's program. The dean of the program was teaching a class, and I thought I should perhaps let him know that I was more than likely on the spectrum. Since I was going to be a mental health therapist, I thought that was something important to discuss and explore.

So after class, I approached him and told him, I just want to let you know that there's a strong indication I might be on the spectrum. I don't know how that might affect my counseling career. Instead of embracing the conversation and having an open discussion, he belittled me and told me that I was likely making up the diagnosis because my son had the diagnosis and I wanted to be close to him.

He criticized me, saying, are you proud that you're announcing to the world that your brain is broken and that your son's brain is broken? Needless to say, I had a lot of trauma for years after that. Fortunately, the trauma propelled me into heavily processing and pondering about my diagnosis and what it meant to get a late-age diagnosis of Asperger's as a female.

I started writing and blogging the process a lot of the angst and confusion. And I called it Everyday Asperger's. It's a retired blog now. I wrote every day for a year to process my feelings and to figure out who the heck I was in this new way of perceiving myself. I ended up writing more than 1,000 pages.

Some of my posts became well-shared in the autistic community and in the community of people who support those on the autism spectrum. As more and more people were searching for answers, support, and help, I was getting hundreds of emails and comments from people around the world on my blog-- some of them with stories that were deeply upsetting.

With so many questions and so many people looking for support, I formed an online group on social media, which I also called Everyday Asperger's. I chose six people to help me lead it. After a year, I left that group for them to mediate and host. At the same time, I started a Facebook page so people could get more information, share, and connect.

I started an author's page too. We have more than 3,000 people on my author's page. It's more of my identity than my legal name. All the work I have done has been completely voluntary. To this day, I still haven't made a profit. Now people are starting to pay it forward in the community and starting even more support groups.

As a result, thousands of us on the spectrum and our supporters have been able to connect and share resources. I actually just got the most brilliant message on LinkedIn yesterday from someone who reached out to me nine years ago because she was worried about her daughter and how to help her. Now she has her own ADHD coaching support business, where she helps people and is paying it forward. I'm very thankful for that one incident at the university that turned into something brilliant, taking that hurt and angst and dark and turning it into something great.

"Building a Career." Vocationally-wise, I have two hats that merge. One is my advocacy work, spreading awareness and supporting others; and the other is my paid job, which is speaking at conferences, writing articles, doing podcasts and interviews, et cetera. Part of that is my job at Ultranauts Incorporated, which was formerly called Ultra Testing.

The way I found that job is actually really interesting. I had started communicating online and in the different autistic communities on Facebook after I got my diagnosis. And someone had randomly posted in one of the support groups that there was a company looking for autistic software testers. It was only 10 hours a week, part time, flexible hours, and so I applied knowing nothing about it.

It turned out to be a brick and mortar startup company founded by two MIT graduates in New York. At the time, they had five testers. I applied and went through the interviews, went through the training assessment week, and it turned out that I wasn't a good fit for software testing at all.

Thankfully, they appreciated my background and skill set of being a teacher and a writer so much that they told me that they were going to create a specialized job for me and reach out in a few months. I never thought that a company would actually do that, but they did. A few months later, they hired me on as a recruiting coordinator.

I'm extremely proud to say that Ultranauts has an autism-hiring initiative. I have been there for six years. But for the last seven or so years, we have grown from 5 testers to now more than 60. We're routinely bringing on quality engineers, coders, and all different positions, including a director of talent. We just hired a VP who is on the spectrum herself.

Through my work here, I've worn a number of different hats over the last six years. I would say one of my favorite projects has been my major role in developing the recruitment process so that it's not only friendly for the general population, but it also follows the best practices for autistic people.

Our interviews are structured, not unstructured. They're behavioral interviews, so they have specific scenarios people can picture in their minds and pull back from experience. We don't ask open-ended, random questions like, where do you see yourself five years from now? We use objective tests and rubrics with our interviews. We use the same questions for everyone we interview in an attempt to eliminate as much subjectivity out of our interviewing and screening process as possible.

Of course, there is always going to be some level of subjectivity, but we are also continually analyzing and looking for ways to improve our screening process. And we adapt it several times a year. Some of what I do goes beyond recruiting. I also do community management work, where I create community gatherings, which we do once a month.

It's paid time where team members can join together virtually and talk about what's working and not working at the company. We take that input and bring it directly to the senior leadership team. We have also implemented team forums, which, like our community gatherings, occur once a month. These are led by J. David Hall of neuroguides.org.

He talks for an hour with everyone about what's happening in the world and what is hard and difficult. So it's very nice that the community has a safe place to meet once a month, led by an autistic individual, talking about how we can all support one another. We are very big on trying to provide an online community to support our team members, and we have several other tools and processes that we utilize as well, although I won't get into them.

"Autistic Strengths." I have a lot of the same strengths that many other individuals on the autism spectrum have. One of those is the ability to hyperfocus on things that interest me. I have uncounted hours of study and research into the topic of autism and how it relates to the workplace and neurodiversity. I absolutely love it.

I've also interviewed and connected with hundreds of people all over the world through my blogs, social media, radio, podcasts, and now through conference appearances. I've also written tons of articles on LinkedIn and in my blogs. One of the other interesting things that I have found through some of my networking with other autistic adults is a strong sense of honesty, integrity, and transparency among the autistic population.

If they're going to be late for work, they want to stay late after to make up for those hours. I see that in myself too. I've been working from home for six years. And because I'm not entering a brick and mortar building, I'm overly conscientious about not underworking. Because of that, I have a tendency to overwork, and I'll put in consistently 10 to 20 hours of overtime a week because I want to make sure I'm doing my best. I see that in a lot of autistic people, and that's a lot of unpaid work time for many.

Another thing I see in those on the spectrum is an advanced ability to find discrepancies in things that are sticking out outside of the norm-- whether that's in a conversation, in social justice, in politics, et cetera. In the case of where I work, it's being able to look at a website or an application and find errors that would make a user's experience more beneficial and efficient.

In my case specifically, I'm able to use my attention to detail and pattern-seeking ability to speed read and pick out key terms. Another common attribute that I see with autistic people is out-of-the-box thinking. I and others like to refer to it as fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the ability to take an object, such as a pencil, and list 30 or so things you can do with that pencil. It's an ability to think outside of what is the standard definition or label and look at other ways to use an object, idea, process, procedure.

Somewhat similar to that is bottom-up thinking, which is an understanding of the details coming together before a full understanding of the concept. For example, if someone wants to learn about the stigmas of autism, one would start by looking at 100 different resources without strongly attaching oneself to an answer or reaching confirmation bias at the beginning. Then, at the end, they would look at all the evidence and build a hypothesis from the results.

"Advice for Others." My first piece of advice would be that some of those companies that specialize or emphasize autism-hiring programs, you need to be careful of. Some of those companies are only focused on the diversity part of the numbers and getting people through the door. There might be handbooks written on the diversity part, but there's no focus on inclusion.

There's a huge difference between diversity and inclusion. Inclusion is about having a sense of belonging, being seen, and having your opinion matter. It's also about having support mechanisms. I can't tell you how many times I hear from people who have gone through autism-hiring initiative programs and there is no support to be found once they're hired. So do a lot of research beforehand.

I would also recommend to people to try to do as much as they can to build their portfolios. I've written for The Mighty, Autism Parent Magazine, NeuroClastic, and Different Brains. If you have a good idea or article, reach out to someone who has some swing, and there's a chance you can get something you write published. Even though I would consider myself well-established, I still try to do podcasts and other work so I can continue to build my portfolio and reach more people.

Whatever career field, whatever your interest, don't wait for a paid job. Start building that portfolio and start building your experience. Look for ways to empower yourself, and try not to look at your first job as end all. Your first job can be a stepping stone. That can lead to someone at the job knowing about another job. It can help you learn teamwork, follow through, logistics, focus, and communication skills.

Alike to bottom-up thinking, you can make it all about building from the bottom towards a career that you eventually want to have. Sometimes an autistic person might have a very strong interest in, for example, animals and they want to be a vet. However, they can't jump from high school to being a vet, so it is important to map out things that they can do in the meantime to build those skills.

Maybe they can volunteer at an animal shelter or at a zoo. They might even be able to make some extra money pet sitting. It is all about starting small. If you're currently searching for a job or even if you're not, I would definitely tap into LinkedIn. As a recruiter, I looked at LinkedIn profiles often, and other recruiters do as well. It's important to have a clean profile that's updated and professional, picture included.

Also don't be afraid to connect with recruiters and HR specialists, because they do post and list jobs. I also have a resource page on my blog that I spent a whole year on. There, you can find different resources for autistic people looking for work. That's at myspectrumsuite.com. I also have Autism Net on Facebook, where I post jobs that I hear about. Sometimes the best way to find work comes through word of mouth and social networking.

Having a support system that you can bounce ideas off of is so incredibly essential. Whether it is your parents, friends, a job coach, or a vocational counselor, having somebody who can look at emails, resumes, and cover letters to help you through the process is a huge advantage. Autistic people can do anything. We are a spectrum, and we're human beings.

Unfortunately, when it comes to employment, more often than not, we are pegged into the tech industry or tech-based positions, and that's so far from true. It's a complete falsehood. I have associated with people from all different vocations, including lawyers, doctors, teachers, librarians, nurses, and they're all on the spectrum.

Never ever limit yourself. With the right supports and the right skill set and experience to match, you can do whatever you set your mind to. I know it's cliche, but reach for the stars. Don't let a diagnosis or a condition make you think that you can't be what you want to be. In this world, you can make a difference.