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CAREERS & the disABLED Magazine, established in 1986, is the nation's first and only career-guidance and recruitment magazine for people with disabilities who are at undergraduate, graduate, or professional levels. Each issue features a special Braille section.

CAREERS & the disABLED has won many awards, including several media "Award of Excellence" acknowledgments from the President's Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities.

This magazine reaches people with disabilities nationwide at their home addresses, colleges and universities, and chapters of student and professional organizations through a paid subscription.


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 STEM PROFESSIONALS WITH DISABILITIES TALK TO YOUTH ABOUT CAREERS

Learning from the experiences of professionals with disabilities can make all the difference for students with disabilities transitioning into the workforce. Recently, the Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology (DO-IT) Center at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle hosted a career panel of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals with disabilities. The audience included over 50 high school and college students with disabilities. The six adult panelists (Anna, Katie, Joe, Karen, Michael, and Jessie) talked about their careers, their experiences in engineering and technology f ields, and offered advice.
 
Here are some highlights: Asked what’s it like in the work environment, Jessie, who works at Amazon supporting payments on the company’s websites, responded she found management to be very accepting.
 
“I have a learning disability, so I don’t necessarily disclose that to everyone that I work with,” Jessie commented. “But it has been very important managing my workload to set the expectations with my manager and other teams that are dependent upon the work that I produce. I budget time for tasks that involve a lot of reading or writing, so it’s important that I set aside time to do that. The reality is you succeed when you are an advocate and when you are proactive about what you need to be successful in the work place. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you need. If you don’t, then you will find yourselves sort of getting in trouble here and there and that can snowball into a big problem. So be open up front where you have to, when you need to.”
 
Speaking to the challenges faced at work, Karen, an architect, recalled how she experienced quizzical looks from colleagues on how she was going to handle the more physical aspects of her job—such as climbing ladders and piles of 2x4’s.
 
“I had to develop some techniques in order to be able to work with the drawings physically,” she said. “But I figured it out, and I was very proactive in terms of letting my perspective employers know that I had already worked this out.”
 
For Katie, who works as an engineer at Microsoft and is deaf, one of the challenges is large meetings, where a lot of different people talk at once. “I have to remind them all to look at me and speak slowly,” she stated. “If I am driving a meeting, I have to ask a coworker to take notes for me. Microsoft has a really great system in place for setting up captioning for meetings for large group events, so I have taken advantage of that.”
 
Joe, a PhD student in the college of education and educational psychology and a graduate student assistant at a social science computing and statistics lab, added “Sometimes you may need to work harder to prove that you are capable of being an asset to a company. It’s more than just the challenges of the disability; it is overcoming the attitudes of others. It is emotionally challenging to do that, but you have to work through it and keep trying. You will see the results, because people will start to respect you. The attitude barriers are probably the biggest challenges I face.”
 
Anna, a web accessibility evaluator at UW, noted that at job interviews, the interviewer is not allowed to ask about her disability. “I know they have questions about it though, and how it is going to affect them if they hire me. So I will often open up that discussion and say I know you are not allowed to ask me about this, so I would like to tell you what I am thinking right now. I just open that conversation, because when you feel comfortable talking about it, you look like you are comfortable with yourself and you come across as being more confident and more able to overcome challenges.”
 
Michael, co-director of the Northwest ADA center in Mt. Lake terrace, “latched on” to a mentor he met at the rehab office after college. “Throughout the years, I still connect with him once in a while to ask questions about different job scenarios or situations. If possible, find yourself a good mentor, someone you can actually talk to or email or call when you start a new job. It’s great to have some outside confidence source that you can work with and ask questions and get what you need.”
 
He advised audience members to reach out to DO-IT program and AccessSTEM Careers mentors. “They can help you with many difficult situations,” he said.
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