Jon Sigworth wakes up differently than any other Dartmouth student. When the Hamden, Connecticut, native transferred from Wesleyan during his sophomore year to take advantage of Dartmouth’s support for projects abroad, he became the only student wheelchair user on campus. “The hardest part is actually psychological,” says Sigworth. “You know you can’t just roll out of bed. I have two hours of work ahead of me, and that’s before I even eat breakfast.”

Sigworth first transfers from bed to wheelchair, a tricky balancing act. “It’s like learning to walk on 20-foot stilts,” says Sigworth, a level C-5/C-6 quadriplegic as the result of a 2006 biking accident in India, where he spent part of a gap year. Sigworth was biking to his world religion class when his bike hit a rock in the trail. He lost control and went over a 70-foot cliff. “I was really lucky because I actually fell right next to a hospital,” explains Sigworth. “I fell behind a shed. I’m sure I would have bled to death, but a few of the workers were outside on a break and they saw me fall.”

Sigworth has no sensation below his chest and limited use of his hands. “So you lean forward with your shoulders and push off the bed onto the chair,” he says. Normally, the transfer goes fine and takes less than a minute, but if he falls he can’t get up. “I fell once and Safety and Security had to break in the door,” says Sigworth, who was able to alert the office with his cell phone. Everything takes longer: showering, pulling his pants on one leg at a time, bending his wrist like a hook to pull them up because he can’t move his fingers, tying his shoes with his teeth.

Allen Koop ’65, a Dartmouth history professor (and the pastor of Sigworth’s church), asks each student to say something about themselves on the first day of class. “There was Jon in his wheelchair,” Koop recalls, “and when it was his turn, he introduced himself and said, with a big smile on his face, ‘I’m an extreme mountain biking instructor.’ And that sums him up. He can poke fun at himself despite his disability.”

Sigworth balances living as a quadriplegic with classes, involvement with campus Christian ministries and a long list of projects including starting a film club and working with Empowering Spinal Cord Injured Persons (ESCIP) in India. Jon and his family started ESCIP through the International Humanitarian Foundation to provide advocacy, outreach and networking for people across the globe coping with spinal injuries.

Despite its obvious challenges, Dartmouth has proved accessible to Sigworth. “If nothing else at least it’s pretty flat,” he says. There are some frustrations: There’s no elevator in privately owned Casque & Gauntlet, where Sigworth chose to live, so he can use only the ground floor. There are places on campus, such as the Collis porch, that he can’t get to easily. The wheelchair-accessible seating in the football stadium is not in the student section.

That said, Dartmouth has made efforts to make its buildings accessible. “Codes are minimums, and when we can we try to do more,” says Woody Eckels, director of residential operations. “In 2007, when we renovated Hitchcock [residence hall], the code requirement was that something like 20 percent of rooms be made accessible. We chose to make 100 percent of the rooms available.”

Dartmouth’s philosophy has been to make accessibility upgrades as needed. “We are not designing specific rooms for specific needs, because even though the code says that’s okay, that limits student choice,” explains Eckels. For example, recently a hearing-impaired student particularly liked living in Foley House. Residential life installed horn strobe lights (a visual fire alarm system for the hearing impaired) in three different rooms as the student changed rooms term to term.

“I have a fairly informed understanding of the challenges faced by someone in a wheelchair,” says Eckels, whose father worked at the College for 22 years—most of them as a paraplegic. Still, Dartmouth, like many institutions, is struggling with the tension of making spaces accessible for all users, while dealing with the fact that renovations are expensive and often affect few, or even just one, student.

Sigworth has adjusted to his injury with a wry sense of humor and strong sense of self-sufficiency. When asked how he clips his fingernails, he laughs. “I can still bite them,” he says. As with getting out of bed, however, writing a paper can take Sigworth twice as long as it does an able-bodied student. He first drafts the assignment by hand, gripping a pen with his knuckles and flexing his wrist to write. This allows him to compose his thoughts; he then uses dictation software to transfer the paper to his laptop. He edits dictation errors using his knuckles.

He can’t always compensate, though. “You lose spontaneity,” he says. “Last year on the first snow there was a blitz that there would be a snowball fight on the Green in 20 minutes.” Sigworth would have joined the fray, but he’d just spent two hours getting ready for bed.

“Even simple things, such as watching how much effort he has to spend to get in and out of a car, and the cheer and grace with which he does this are, to me, remarkable,” says friend Shengzhi Li ’12.

“One part of me thinks I should do everything myself—I should get up at 6 and be in class by 8—but it’s exhausting,” says Sigworth. “If I get help, it takes an hour instead of two, but then I wonder if I’m not pushing myself hard enough.”

Sigworth, who was into extreme unicycling before his accident, still loves the outdoors. One of his favorite Dartmouth memories is an Easter morning sunrise service held atop a mountain in the national park in Woodstock, Vermont, to which a friend carried him.

“The limits of being wheelchair-bound,” explains Sigworth, “aren’t limits when there are people there for me.”

Sarah Schewe is a double major in anthropology and design thinking. She’s from Minnesota.