News and Knowledge

OAR recently said goodbye to Corinne Gambacurta, who was an intern for a full academic year, from August 23 through April 16. Her favorite job was writing the Community News articles for OAR’s monthly newsletter. “I loved being able to do my own research to find a topic that was interesting to me personally and the autism community at large. I wrote about some really cool topics (NFL team accessibility, Disney PIXAR’s inclusion of a character with autism, and Greta Thunberg, to name a few) that I thought were relevant and interesting.”

That wasn’t all though. Another ongoing responsibility was to identify and work with writers and edit the posts for OAR’s blog, which was noted as one of the top 25 best autism blogs by Action Behavior Centers. She also worked on Sex Ed for Self-Advocates, doing audio editing and formatting. More recently, she reached out to almost 3,000 school administrators, teachers, and special education departments to promote the Kit for Kids for Autism Awareness Month.

She will be heading to Cornell in the fall for graduate school. She says she will take what she learned and experienced at OAR with her. “I greatly valued being able to work independently and develop skills I was completely unfamiliar with before OAR. I feel a lot more confident in my ability to achieve success in this new phase of my education.”