Scientific Career with Dyslexia
Report from Intern (1/2024) about our colleagues Michael Butzek carrer in as science as a mechanical engineer – despite a reading and writing disability.
When Prof. Michael Butzek gives a lecture, what is striking immediately is how freely he speaks. The 57-year-old clicks through the slides of his PowerPoint presentation, but seems to know them by heart. There is a reason for this: the team leader at ZEA-1 and Professor of Energy Technology at Aachen University of Applied Sciences has difficulty reading and writing. “Above all, I’m incredibly slow,” he says openly. “I have to concentrate hard to work out word by word – and to grasp the meaning of a sentence from them and, in the end, the meaning of an entire text.” Looking at a word and immediately understanding what it says? Hardly possible for him. Butzek has dyslexia – as do an estimated four per cent of all Germans. He never gave it much thought. “My talents simply lie elsewhere. I’ve accepted my weaknesses and come to terms with them in everyday life,” says the mechanical engineer from Jülich.
Understanding instead of targeted support
Butzek, born in 1966, was never officially tested for dyslexia. “That wasn’t common back then,” he says. “At some point, however, it simply became clear that everyone else could read and write better than me.” Years later, his younger brother was diagnosed with dyslexia. “We were very lucky with our parents,” says Butzek. “For example, when I got angry over my homework, my mum would send me out to play first. She always accepted us the way we were.”
His grammar school teachers noticed Butzek’s problems, but there was no special support. Today, pupils with disabilities are given so-called compensation for disadvantages: they are allowed to take more time for an exam, for example. “In my case, the teachers simply turned a blind eye,” recalls the engineer. “I had the biggest problems with German and foreign languages, even though the content I delivered scored well.” He was really good at maths and science, especially physics. In fact, dyslexia is disproportionately high among people who work in STEM fields. “I was always better at working with numbers than with letters,” he says and laughs. “My physics teacher even predicted a great career for me back then.”
Technical helpers
Even being dyslexic, Butzek has always cut his own path: “Whenever things got difficult, I found solutions for myself.” When studying mechanical engineering at RWTH Aachen University, for example, he realized that he had no chance of taking notes quickly enough in lectures. “So I suggested a deal to my fellow students: they took the notes and I listened very well in return. This enabled me to better understand the bigger picture. I explained them to the others and, in return, copied their notes.”
The pitfalls of everyday life already began to diminish significantly in the 1990s for Michael Butzek when he was able to write his thesis on a computer. “Since then, my most important helper has been the electronic spell checker,” says Butzek. “I don’t send anything out without it. And I no longer write by hand at all.” Today, gendering in texts does cause him problems when reading because asterisks and colons in the middle of words make it even more difficult for him to read. However, he also has a solution for this: “I convert texts in Word to gender-free versions or switch to English text versions.”
A career nevertheless!
Until now, Butzek had never made his special challenges a subject of discussion at FZJ. “I didn’t hide my being dyslexic, but it was never that important to me because I coped well with it both privately and professionally,” says the father of two grown-up daughters. He really enjoys his work at ZEA-1. “It doesn’t bother me if I have to sit at my desk a little longer to read.” As a team leader, he scores with other skills: maintaining an overview and keeping a firm grip on larger projects. “The people around me always looked at my strengths.” Butzek would like to pass on one message to other affected employees: “Dyslexia doesn’t have to hold you back in your academic career!”
https://download.fz-juelich.de/uk/intern-epaper/2024/1_intern/