One Last Post

Hi Everyone!

After 6 amazing weeks in Mysore and 2 weeks of intense traveling in North India, I have made it home to D.C. Leaving India was hard; after two months I feel I barely even scratched the surface of all there is to learn in such a huge country. Still, it feels good to be home for a bit before heading back to school, and I’m certainly taking advantage of some down time.

During my last week in Mysore, I worked to finish my report and then gave a final presentation to the other Cornell students, my mentor, so of the graduate students at V-LEAD, and other SVYM staff. During my presentation I focused on the work I’d been doing, specifically highlighting what I had learned from the two companies I interviewed with.

I learned a lot from the two companies, specifically about the important roles of technology in providing accommodations for people with disabilities. I also got to see the importance of support from the leadership team in developing inclusive environment, which definitely helped me better understand why some companies are more successful than others in implementing equal opportunity policies.

I hope that my work at GRAAM will be meaningful as they take the interview framework I created and use it to analyze other companies. I learned an incredible amount from working at the organization, and I am extremely grateful that SVYM, GRAAM, and EDI provided me with the opportunity to participate.

From here, I hope to take my understanding of some of the key issues in employment for people with disabilities in corporate settings and apply that in different settings. I don’t know where that will take me, but I look forward to figuring out!

Have a great last few weeks of summer!

Abigail

A Busy Week, but a Great One

Hi again!

This week was busy, exhausting, and incredible. Be warned, this is a long post, and I definitely dropped the ball on taking photos this week, so my apologies.

On Tuesday, I headed to Bangalore to meet with a team at Cisco, an IT company headquartered in San Jose, CA but with its second global headquarters in Bangalore. The day started at 5 am with a train ride to the city, which was in itself an experience. It was a nice change of pace from the typical modes of transportation, and it was great to see the people who ride trains into the city...at 5 am, nonetheless.

When we arrived in Bangalore we drove to the Cisco headquarters and met with HR representatives, leaders of the Cisco Disability Awareness Network (CDAN), and employees with disabilities to get a full perspectives on Cisco's best practices in employing people with disabilities. Throughout the visit, I was increasingly impressed with Cisco's commitment to this initiative; Among other things, their efforts to make all of their technology accessible, their support of innovation in this area, and their willingness to continue adapting and changes their policies and practices as the company grows indicate a long-term commitment to creating an inclusive and productive environment for employees with disabilities.

I also got to tour the campus, which is currently 6 buildings holding about 6000 employees and quickly growing. Their office space was, honestly, beautiful, and they've clearly very successful at introducing open work spaces and promoting break spaces. Here is a picture (not my best) of one of these break spaces.

Beautiful break space at Cisco

We took the train back, and at the end of such a long day I crashed pretty hard. Wednesday was spent transcribing the interviews, and then on Thursday, I turned around and did it again, this time headed to Bangalore to meet with a similar group of people at Wipro, and Indian IT consulting firm. We hopped on the train at a much more reasonable time, arriving at the company around 3 pm. Similar to Cisco, I was amazed by Wipro's commitment to employing people with disabilities. Their emphasis on creating a career for people with disabilities, not just hiring them, was striking, and each employee that I spoke to addressed this as one of Wipro's many strengths in employing people with disabilities.

Inside of the train

Each visit was amazing in its own way, and a few patterns stuck out to me in terms of these companies' efforts to be equal opportunity employers. The first was both companies' impressive use of technologies that they were largely developing internally to make their workplaces accessible. This reliance on technology suggests to me that companies who are looking to improve their practices should increasingly be looking to technology to support them in that. Another thing both companies mentioned was their difficulty in finding enough people to employ. This definitely raises the question of what training needs to be provided in school, and in fact Wipro is now using Wipro Cares, their CSR initiative, to provide that education to young students in the hope that they can ensure these students get the training they need.

Train station

That's all for now! I can't believe this is the last week... where did the time go?!?!

Have a great week!