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April 13, 2010
Employers Should Reach Out More to Deaf Community
A recent article in our business section caught my eye: "RIT examines deaf entrepreneurship." The article talked about the estimated 44 percent unemployment among people with a hearing disability and how RIT is studying entrepreneurship in the deaf community with an eye toward promoting it.
So I thought I'd share my experience from two years ago when I supervised a deaf intern here. I was overseeing our custom content department (magazines, special sections, niche web sites) and a deaf RIT student applied for an internship as a copy editor. I was apprehensive at first, as I'd never worked closely with a deaf person before, but he had good experience on student publications so I wanted to give him a shot. It turned out to be such a wonderful experience - for him, me and my staff.
The student was born deaf ("deaf as a stone" as he put it to us), grew up in Rochester and attended the School for the Deaf here.
He was able to read lips and speak, but frankly, I never developed a good understanding of what he was saying (although some of my staff could), so a lot of our communicating was via computer or writing notes. He didn't seem to mind a bit. For our interview, he brought in his laptop, and we sat at the table in my office and conducted the interview there, with me typing a question and him typing the answer, and vice versa. We were able to smile and laugh together. Before he started as an intern, some staff from RIT came and held an hour-long workshop with my staff and me, with the intern there. It was a great ice-breaker, as we learned more about the challenges of being deaf and how we could make the internship a success.
Our intern did a good job for us, and he graduated from RIT and has been pursuing a master's degree so he can teach. In many workplaces, people often talk about diversity, but we're usually referring to race or gender. We should be doing more talking about other kinds of diversity, and reaching out more to the deaf community.
http://www.ntid.rit.edu/media/full_text.php?article_id=1217
Posted by 4HL on April 13, 2010 9:26 AM
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