“I’m a freshman, born in Berkeley, California, and raised in Oakland before my family moved to Salt Lake City nine years ago. I have cerebral palsy, and I’m a disability advocate on social media. I chose to study strategic communications because my end goal is to do PR marketing for a disability-related company.

Before starting at the U this fall, I was part of a six-week summer internship with an adaptive fashion nonprofit called Runway of Dreams. I was teamed up with three other interns — all college students from around the country. Our task was to design an adaptive accessory for people with disabilities. We worked remotely to create an adaptive hair accessory, a claw clip that you can put in your hair with one hand. You just squeeze the clip, and it stays open — like how a gas pump stays open. Then when you have your hair organized, you click the claw back down, and it grabs the hair.

We presented our idea and my team won! And because we won, we were invited to attend a runway show during New York Fashion Week. I haven’t been to New York. And I actually leave this Saturday to go back East. It’ll be fun and I can’t wait to meet my other intern teammates who I talked to for hours each day for those six weeks and are now my friends.

As we’re scattered across the country, we’re trying to raise $4,000 to fund this trip so we can pay for flights, lodging, ground transportation and food. Any money that we raise that we don’t use will be donated to nonprofits like Utah’s own Wasatch Adaptive Sports and Runway of Dreams to help pay for future winning design teams to go to Fashion Week.

Sadly, I’m not actually going on the runway to show the claw. We have a single prototype; if we had the opportunity to make the claw a real, sellable product that consumers could buy, that would be amazing. But as of right now, it’s just an idea.

I’m  excited to go to New York to have fun and to network with other people in this profession.”

— Drake Becker, freshman studying strategic communications, Salt Lake City, Utah