Did you know that the third Wednesday in October is National Disability Mentoring Day (DMD)? And has been for ten years? Neither did I! But it is! And who am I? I am a late-deafened adult and friend of the bloggess who normally graces this site.
I live in New York City and so spent my DMD with the Mayor’s Office of People with Disabilities (MOPD). MOPD organized several hundred disabled adults to shadow mid-career professionals at work throughout the five boroughs. Those who were chosen to participate were matched up with mentors within both government and the private sector.
I think because my personal career background is in publishing, I was asked to participate in DMD at Bloomberg LP. Which was really beyond anything that I expected. It has an excellent reputation both for journalistic and data quality but also for its work culture and its phenomenally impressive offices. Can we stop here for a second and talk about them? Imagine you’d entered the workplace equivalent of a boutique hotel in Miami mixed with a data newsfeed: glass, white marble, translucent pink and orange and purple signs with moving walls of data. The attention to detail was phenomenal. It helped to solidify my thinking that good companies are good throughout their organization — nothing slips by them. Even the food we were served was fantastic.
Anyway, I’m getting ahead to the micro details and forgetting the bigger picture. Sorry about that. Let me backtrack and talk about getting into the program.
I moved to NYC in August to reunite with my partner who moved here the year before. I sort of dicked around in Washington, D.C. for a year while trying to figure out what to do with my life, and then decided that I needed to seek out the services of New York State’s vocational rehabilitation. VR is used by the disabled (I cringe at that word, but there are none better) for help in the workforce. New York State connects VR to education support services for the disabled into a program called VESID (Vocational and Educational Services for Individuals with Disabilities), run through the Department of Education. So at the encouragement of the state, I moved here in August after hooking up with the awesome people at Manhattan VESID. Through my career action plan there, it was recommended that I apply for DMD through MOPD. I assumed this was something done only here in New York, before learning that DMD is a national program.
I interviewed for the program at MOPD’s office near the Brooklyn Bridge and then waited. I was a little worried, actually. The interview went just okay. I think the biggest problem I had was being assigned an American Sign Language interpreter. My ASL isn’t there yet. And while I appreciated the interpreter doing a form of English-based signing, I found it to be a distraction. I am not used to working with interpreters and should have just focused on the speaker. Unfortunately, MOPD doesn’t offer real-time captioning (CART).
And yet despite my nervousness, a month later I was contacted by MOPD and learned that my mentoring day would be at Bloomberg LP in the marketing-creative department. I quickly RSVPed for an orientation session. (I was excited!) And then the following week, feeling under-dressed, I arrived at Bloomberg to meet the other mentees and my mentor. We were welcomed with a light breakfast and a short introduction about the day from their HR department, and then introduced to our mentors and whisked away to our respective departments.
While in marketing, I spoke with people in various jobs within the group — a print designer, a motion graphics person, my mentor who was a photographer and ad designer, and the marketing department lead. I got to talk about my own experience in relation to the jobs that the others were doing. I also got to ask about workflow, as I’ve specifically not been job hunting at large organizations because of my concerns over interoffice communication. Workflow is difficult for large companies to change and adjust to, and a person with different communication needs is too often the odd person out.
In some ways, I wasn’t prepared for how much it was like an interview. I thought it would be more one-on-one, matched with people in similar situations. Perhaps in some ways that’s a drawback. I think what disabled workers need to see is other disabled workers and how they are functioning in a work environment. I know what it’s like to work with hearies. and generally know what the challenges are there. What I don’t know is how other deafies navigate a hearing-focused work environment.
In the end though, it was a great opportunity to present myself to the team at Bloomberg LP and see the inside of a marketing department at a large media company. Whether it will lead to anything longer term — either as a point of contact within the media community or a position at Bloomberg — it’s too early to say. The biggest advantage I’ve seen so far is having made the contact and gotten impressive feedback within the MOPD and Bloomberg LP loop. I’m now on the MOPD list of disabled, mid-career professionals who make a good impression. And MOPD is seemingly a good advocacy organization with great ties to the NYC business community, so for that reason alone I rate the DMD a success.
