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My name is Amy, I'm 20 and I'm a student at the Deaf Academy in the Post 19 Centre. Also, I'm the Vice Chair and Secretary for the Student Council.
In terms of aspirations then, what do you think you might like to do?
Well, I'm kind of split with that because half of me wants to work in a museum, kind of in the background of a museum, kind of. You know, I like looking after things, the objects, and maybe you know the archiving, researching, cleaning things, kind of what is this object, what happened with this object, things like that. And the other half of me is really interested in animal care. I love birds. I really want to work with birds. I've got three chickens myself. These are quite interesting but quite different worlds.
How do you think you might be able to blend them together?
I'm thinking maybe if I could do animal care linked to something within a museum because now museums do have birds in them and things - you know they've got they've got stuffed birds, they've got feathers, so there could be work there within a museum that's linked to birds. It could be to do with you know cleaning them, maintaining them, something like that.
Where do you think these ideas and these aspirations have come from?
A long time ago when I was really small, I remember picking up my first feather with my granddad and he taught me about different birds, wildlife and also museums and history. That has been kind of linked together, you know, finding things and wondering, hmm, what is that? Where has it come from? You know, what date is it from? Things like that. So yeah, I've always been interested in that.
Is there anything you think that might prove tricky in order for you to achieve your aspirations? Communication. Communication is really difficult if there's no interpreters. Will there be communication breakdowns because if they're hearing and don't know BSL, and I'm deaf and I use BSL, where's that going to leave me? How's it going to work? Am I going to have to teach them BSL? So that's quite difficult. If I want to work on my own, that would be fine. But within a team, that's going to be difficult.
So how is this going to be overcome, do you think?
Deaf awareness training, campaigning, making sure interpreters are booked. Those three things are really important so that hearing people are aware of how to work with me, how we can work together.
If we as a society, as a series of workplaces, could actually bring that together, what kind of difference would it make?
I think it would improve the work environment and workplaces a lot. Because, you know, I've done some fantastic things. I've campaigned for deaf rights and giving them awareness of BSL and deafness is really just the basis, it's just the basics to go from. So hopefully they would then know that if a deaf person does come along that they can have a conversation with them. You know, I can teach people things and they can teach me too, because there'll be differences in how to work together so that we can come together. So we'll be teaching each other really.