#ThriveCollege

I had an amazing opportunity to be a part of a Tweet chat for Easter Seals, you might remember Easter Seals from my incredible internship with them last summer! #ThriveCollege sponsored by Easter Seals Thrive aims to spread awareness of disability in colleges, the resources your colleges can provide and such. You can find out more information on what Thrive does for our community at the link here.

First, I wanted to clarify a couple of things from my previous blog post (if you missed it here it is). It got shared so many times, I think the major message got a bit lost. It was purely to inform, not to complain of my experiences--I would never replace my journey for someone else's. The blog post was not written to complain but to enhance the problems we as a community encounter. I realize most college graduates struggle finding a job too, but our window of opportunities are even more narrower with our "disability".

I used my retail interview experience as an example, I am currently searching for a corporate/firm entry level job with Public Relations or Social Media--but while I'm searching for that perfect job, I'm applying to a couple of retail jobs to keep my bills paid! If you have any questions for me or about the community, please don't hesitate to reach out to me on social media; the links to my pages are on the top of my blog (the neon green heart).

If you shared, commented or messaged me about the post, thank you for being involved and supporting your community by creating some amazing dialogue. I know a lot of people's eyes were opened through reading my post and your comments! All I ask for is to keep this dialogue going until changes happens!

Moving on to the #ThriveCollege chat. You can read all about the chat here, thanks to Storify!

Why did I get involved?

I'm always eager to jump in a live Twitter chat because people want to listen to your opinion, experience and stories. It's a great way to interact with people you don't usually interact with on Twitter. Also, I love seeing other people's answers to questions being asked. People truly come from various backgrounds, but sometimes they have similar experience with you--you're able to connect with them.

There's something about live tweeting that gets my adrenaline up and running, (you can see how much I love social media here) and makes the whole experience tremendously exciting. Maybe it's the fast paced tweeting back and forth, or being able to answer sometimes taboo questions for people.

For this particular situation, I got involved because it strikes close to my heart. I'm a woman who went to college, and I happen to be Deaf. See how I placed my Deafness as my least important fact? Because as an educated woman I'm able to lead an example that Deaf people can go to college and they don't let their "disability" bring them down. People often don't realize how much resources colleges/universities have for people with disabilities of all sorts. Education about people with disabilities start very small, but with live chats, we're able to reach out more to people.

With this chat I can only hope to sustain the conversation about the stigma around people with disabilities and their futures.

How do you think we did? What are your suggestions for any future live chats ie. questions being asked, answers and such?