Case studies

Sarah's story

Sarah came to Sheffield to do her PhD. She had previously studied at two other universities to complete her undergraduate and masters degrees, and so she had to set up her support from scratch at Sheffield.

Sarah had a diagnosis of autism and some mobility restrictions. Sarah accessed DDSS before she started her course as soon as she heard she was offered a place, and she attended the Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) induction day in July before even starting university.

Because of this, Sarah was able to have a lot of her support up and running the week she started. Through her DSA needs assessment, Sarah had two support workers, an in-house specialist mentor and an external agency autism study skills tutor.  

Towards the end of the second year, Sarah and her supervisor had a few communication issues, and things were rather difficult. The University, with help from her Disability Advisor in DDSS, arranged for more regular contact with her secondary supervisor, and both supervisors attended supervision as often as possible.

After the Covid-19 pandemic, Sarah’s department changed to a hot-desking policy for all PhD students. This did not suit Sarah’s need for consistency and knowing what to expect when going into work.

The Disability Liaison Officer (DLO) in her department worked to guarantee Sarah a set desk next to a window for natural light, and Sarah was given a place to store her work material to ensure she didn't have to carry things around due to her mobility issues. 

Lucas' story

The usual mentoring support around planning and organisation was not a priority for Lucas. He prioritised planning to such a degree that, at times, creating very detailed weekly planners became a way of procrastinating and not starting work.

Through mentoring, Lucas was able to recognise this and a more streamlined planning strategy was developed, with clear weekly goals. Lucas found this accountability was a great motivator.

The support Lucas needed most was around communication with his supervisor. Initially, he found supervision meetings really challenging and not very helpful. Lucas would use mentoring to draft emails to his supervisor in preparation for supervision sessions, ensuring he was really clear beforehand as to what he needed from each supervision session.

With support from his mentor, Lucas was able to articulate what supervision structure worked for him. His supervisor responded positively to this and, instead of monthly supervision sessions, Lucas was able to request weekly meetings.

Instead of only whole chapters being handed in for feedback, Lucas was able to submit sub sections of chapters which enabled ongoing feedback which worked better for him.

As a student with an ADHD diagnosis, Lucas recognised that he needed to break work down into small, achievable steps. He also spoke to his Disability Adviser to ensure his LSP documented that there were times when Lucas would need to take short breaks to manage burnout following periods of intensive work.

Lucas attended the ADHD group sessions run by DDSS. Through these he learnt about techniques such as energy accounting and identifying dopamine hits as a way of motivating himself. These led to far greater productivity for Lucas.