Ava Rose has two passions. One of them, helping women and children who are victims of violence and abuse, is the mission that brought her to UCLA. The other, supporting university students with disabilities, grew out of her own experience of coping with a newly diagnosed disability while pursing her graduate studies.

It took Ava a few years to recognize that she had more than an academic interest in the psychological traumas experienced by women. As an undergraduate in Women's Studies at Barnard College in New York, and later as a graduate student in Cinema Studies at New York University, Ava always focused her work on psychoanalytic theory. Only her medium changed: her senior thesis at Barnard was about Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; at NYU, she was looking at the films of Jane Campion and others that embody traumatic experience in film.

By the time she was finished with all her work but the dissertation, she was also married and the mother of a son. Her husband, Jim Friedman, decided to pursue his cinema studies degree at UCLA, and the family moved west.

As Ava worked on her dissertation long distance, she found herself more and more absorbed in "contemporary thinking about women's experience, and the experience of trauma in particular," she recalls. "All I wanted to do was read about psychology, and I really wasn't interested in film anymore."

Abandoning her work on the cinema studies dissertation, she took a job as an intake counselor for an inpatient program treating women with a history of eating disorders, sexual trauma, or depression. She was promoted to intake director and then program director, as it became "more and more obvious that I really loved this."

Finally, she decided to get a clinical degree "so I could go out and practice. I wanted to do therapy with clients." UCLA was a logical choice. Not only was her husband a student here, but Ava herself had literally been born on campus, at the UCLA Medical Center. Both of her parents were UCLA graduates, and other relatives had attended.

The Master's in Social Work degree is given at the end of an intensive two-year program combining classroom studies and field internships. In her first year, Ava was in class Tuesday and Thursday. Monday and Wednesday she spent at the Neighborhood Youth Association, a grassroots organization in Venice and Mar Vista.

She counseled disadvantaged minority children and their families, and facilitated a support group for senior girls at Venice High School, helping them deal with the violence they both experienced and witnessed. "I discovered the magic of working with kids," Ava says. "They're not rigidly set into who they're going to be. A little bit of empathy and patience and listening really go a long way."

The second year in the social welfare program was to be even more strenuous than the first: two days of class and three days of internship. But the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, which she had been struggling with during her first year, were getting worse. Rheumatoid arthritis is an immune disorder that causes fatigue and swelling in the joints, particularly the hands. It can be crippling.

Diagnosed in June 1996, she started graduate school that September. "I was not prepared to be a person who had a disability," she says. "I didn't know what my rights were. I didn't know I had any entitlements at all." But before long, she had a new friend, Una Hayes-Shepard, another social work student with disabilities. "She reached out to me and educated me," Ava says. "I've sort of made it a mission to reach out and educate other people."

Together, Ava and Una formed a Disabilities Caucus that now extends beyond the Department of Social Welfare and the School of Public Policy and Social Research. With the support of the department's administration, they modified the program's admission requirements to be friendlier to students with disabilities. For example, the revised material says students must have access to transportation, rather than that they must have a car. Driving had been impossible for Ava since January 1997. The language, "reasonable accommodations will be made for students with disabilities," was added in a number of places to bring the admissions catalog into compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Social Welfare's Department Chair Jim Lubben, says, "she's been a real leader in helping others to be more sensitive to this population and to attend to their needs." Her achievements and leadership on the campuswide Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Disabilities "have been very helpful to all of UCLA."

With Dr. Lubben's approval, Ava was able to divide her second year of studies into two years. Last year, she completed her class work. This fall, she began her final internship, at St. John's Hospital's Child and Family Development Center in Santa Monica. She will spend half her time counseling children and their families in the outpatient program, and the rest doing individual and group work in the child abuse program. Ava is particularly excited about doing group work. Child abuse is "such an isolating and shame-producing experience," Ava says. "The chance to connect with other kids who've gone through something similar is very healing, very empowering."

And by different routes, she and her husband Jim may end up graduating from UCLA at the same time. Jim is ABD (all but dissertation) in the Film School, writing his dissertation while working as manager of the Film and Television Archive's Research and Study Center.

Although no thesis is required for an MSW, Ava and her friend Una are conducting a study to measure how well-prepared social work students are to assist people with disabilities. Given that the 50 million Americans with disabilities are disproportionately represented among social work clients, Ava believes this is an important area to explore.

She'll be doing the writing with voice recognition software, she says: "I don't use my hands unless I have to. I try to save them for petting my kitty and tending my flowers."

Published in Fall 1998, Graduate Quarterly