College student Devin Mills, who has autism, came to BridgingApps/Easter Seals Greater Houston in 2025, through Houston City College’s Pathways to Success program, on the advice of success coach Madelyn Traylor. (Pathways to Success focuses on career training for high school graduates with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities. Madelyn partners with Tara Rocha, our BridgingApps Digital Learning Specialist, to include digital skills in Pathways training.)
Devin is currently enrolled at the University of St. Thomas, and is also a home caregiver to his grandmother. He recently got his own laptop, which he finds a useful everyday tool and a bridge between daily responsibilities and long-term goals.
This is Devin’s account of his digital experiences.
Top Technologies for Work, Growth, and Fun
Now that I have a laptop, I find it really cool for everyday tasks: getting my college assignments done, communicating with friends, keeping tabs with my family. A wireless mouse has been really helpful, because I find myself more comfortable using it than a laptop touchpad. The headphones are great, too, especially the noise-cancel feature, which helps me ignore distraction and focus on my schoolwork.
I’m also following my dreams of working in the game development field. Favorite computer tools include:
- Photoshop (which has been really helpful for drawing character designs in digital style).
- Blender, a 3D program that I’m learning to use to make models.
- And I’m a friendly user of ChatGPT, which helps me research school assignments and get rundowns of current events I missed in the news.
Plus, if the books I have for school classes don’t help me enough, now I’ve got the whole internet in my hands.
Top Advantages of Digital Technology
Technology also helps with my family. When my grandmother was sick, I found that ChatGPT could give me step-by-step instructions for making a breakfast platter of pancakes and sausage. That fed me and my grandmother. I still use ChatGPT for recipes, and for guides to prepare food for me and my grandmother whenever my parents are out of the house.
Stuff happening at home sometimes makes it hard to join school classes in person. So I’m glad for hybrid classes, where I can join in person or from home on my phone.
Every day, technology helps me keep the things I do in proper order. I’m operating at a different kind of pace, staying on track better, getting homework done faster than when I did it on paper. I’ll keep using the same digital tools when I get a job: Gemini, Finch, and Headspace to help me with figuring and sorting various aspects of my daily life, while also relieving my day-to-day stress and anxiety of being on the spectrum while engaging with others or doing tasks.
Additional BridgingApps articles on digital-skills training and student programs:
- Client Success Story: Growing and Learning with Down Syndrome (Sarah Brhlik and family were also featured in our early-2026 articles, “Starting the Year Off Right” and “Expanding Inclusiveness and Accessibility”)
- Client Success Story: Learning Fast in the World of Digital Literacy
- Discovering His Mission: The Story of a Digital Literacy Training Graduate
- High School Students with Unaddressed Autism
- Meeting Clients Where They Are: Digital Literacy in Action