Picking at a muffin in a campus cafe, Laura Mackenzie says she and her parents thought she’d go to college, “but pretty much everyone else didn’t.”
Cheerful and matter-of-fact, the 23-year-old recounts troubled years that included difficulty walking and expressing herself, tantrums, inability to interact with people and cringing from physical contact.
She remembers seeing kids playing and not having a clue what to say to them, “although I wanted desperately to join them,” she says.
She was diagnosed with autism at age 7. But she was obviously intelligent.
Armed with her own determination, her parents’ enthusiastic support and some help from special programs in school and college, here she is, earning a bachelor’s in behavioral science at Metropolitan State University in Denver.
“To put things into context, people thought I’d be in a mental institution,” says Mackenzie, who says she processes information and expresses herself relatively slowly but now belongs to two honor societies. “Looking back on it, it’s almost funny.”
