First openly Autistic 'Survivor' contestant

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A Brown University student is making television history as the first openly autistic person to compete on “Survivor.”

Eva Erickson will be trying her hand at the $1 million grand prize in Season 48.

“When I finally got the call, I was running around the room like a dog,” she said. “Just jumping off the walls, like, oh my God, I’m going to be on ‘Survivor!'”

The 24-year-old was diagnosed with autism when she was just a year old.

“The first doctors were telling my parents that I would never hold a job, I would never live independently, that at most they could hope that I would marry someone else also on the autism spectrum,” she told 12 News.

Now, Erickson is living thousands of miles away from her home in Minnesota. She is also getting her PhD in engineering at Brown University, where she is the captain of the club hockey team.

Not to mention, she is competing in one of the most cutthroat reality competition shows on television.

“Knowing that ‘Survivor’ is a game of lying, people are always going to be lying, and I might not pick up on the same cues as everyone else,” she said. “That was something that I was very concerned about but that’s where I knew I wanted my strategy to involve having really strong alliances.”

Erickson has now embraced her autism as a gift. She hopes by sharing her story on “Survivor,” other people on the spectrum can do the same.