The Mike Ching Story!

Employing the Disabled is a Great Idea!
Celebrating Disability Employment Awareness Month!

Job: IBM Research

Mike Ching is blind. But for the better part of his life, he didn't consider himself disabled. Born with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative retinal disease in which the eyes' photoreceptor cells gradually die, Mike's parents always made a point of differentiating people who had poor vision from those who were "handicapped." Initially, this distinction didn't make much difference.

During his early years in school, Mike was able to read with a hand-held magnifier. By high school, he needed the aid of CCTV, but he was still able to adapt and make the grade. In fact, it was self-accommodation that first prompted Mike to use his creativity and innate problem-solving skills to take his love of computers to a new level. Of course if you ask Mike, his efforts were less a stroke of creative genius than pure teenage laziness.

"As a young kid, I loved video games. At that point, it was all about how far you could get within the game, so I figured out how to modify the character code so that I could advance to higher levels. When I got to high school, my vision had deteriorated enough that it became hard to write on paper. I was a typical teenager... too lazy to really work at writing. So for example, in physics, I just wrote programs to solve the problems for me. In my mind, using the computer was fun and it saved me time. It wasn't something I realized I was really good at until later, in college," he says.

It was during college that Mike first came face-to-face with his disability. Having emigrated from a tight-knit community in Taiwan to a small town in New Jersey at the age of 10, Mike had never even met another person with a disability until he got to Stanford University in 1992.

Initially, being around other people with disabilities made Mike extremely uncomfortable. "My vision was getting progressively worse and I think that distinction my parents had always made between having vision problems and being 'handicapped' prejudiced me. On some level, I was beginning to realize that I had more than a 'little problem' and it was terrifying. Meeting other blind people was like looking into a mirror and seeing something I wasn't ready to see. I didn't want to acknowledge my disability," remembers Mike.

By his junior year in college, Mike could no longer read with any kind of magnifying technology. He was in effect, completely blind. Even though he knew the staff at Stanford's Disability Resource Center quite well, he never really looked into the full range of services offered by the university until he was close to graduating. As a result many basic tasks, like navigating campus streets and hallways, became an overwhelming challenge, despite the fact that he'd memorized the vast majority of the school's landscape. Although Mike says his friends may have noticed only minor changes in his personality at the time, for him, it was a major turning point.

"People who knew me best probably just thought I was more quiet than usual. But I was devastated. When I first got to Stanford, I was ambitious—a gung-ho computer science major with big plans for my career. But I was unprepared for my disability catching up with me. I wasn't scared of being blind as much as losing my quality of life. I wanted to get married, have a family, and a career. For a while, I just gave up," he says.

Feeling the limitations of his disability prompted Mike to change his major from computer science to something he felt was more manageable, economics. It was a decision he would regret for several years. After graduating with his undergraduate degree in economics and watching classmates with similar grades and backgrounds head off to Wall Street and other exciting opportunities, Mike found himself faced with more hurdles. Getting interviews wasn't a problem. But prospective employers who were so enthusiastic during phone interviews often found that the position "wasn't a good fit" after meeting Mike in person and realizing that he was blind. Finally, family connections helped him secure a job with an Internet start-up.

Eventually, Mike regained his focus and realized that he needed to go back to school to finish the computer science degree he started. Equipped with only his natural technological aptitude and without any significant educational background in computer science, he elected to take a phased approach to earning his master's degree. In 2000, he began taking community college classes, ultimately moving on to continuing education extension classes at the University of California, Irvine. Even though he wasn't an official full-time student, Mike couldn't resist a chance to see what kind of internships the best companies in the industry had to offer the university's computer science students, so he snuck into a recruiting fair on campus, found the IBM booth, and scheduled an interview.

When he arrived for the interview, administrators in the college recruiting office realized he wasn't a full-time student, but lucky for Mike, they let him stay for the interview anyway. Mike credits the first person he met at IBM with helping him make a major shift in attitude about work and his disability. "Susan Hom made a huge difference for me," he says. "There was a hiring freeze at the time and although she said she couldn't hire me as an intern unless I was formally accepted to a graduate program, her primary focus was on my abilities, not my blindness. As soon as I got accepted to Stanford's masters program in computer science, she immediately offered me a co-op working with the IBM DB2® team, and ultimately became a mentor."

After obtaining his master's degree and completing his internship at IBM, Mike had a number of excellent career prospects with Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, and Deloitte & Touche. Ultimately though, he chose to join IBM Research, which he says is the perfect place for him since it's an environment that gives him the freedom to work in the areas in which he can make the most difference. Since his first auspicious interview with IBM, Mike has regained the ambition, creativity, and drive that were so much a part of his personality as a college freshman at Stanford. He was promoted into IBM management after just two years with the company, an impressive accomplishment by any standards. He gives IBM a lot of credit for helping him realize his career goals.

"I don't need a lot of physical accommodations, although IBM has always done a good job of providing me with continuous upgrades to my screen reader software. To me, the biggest accommodation that IBM offers is accommodation of attitude. When I came to interview here, many of the managers I spoke with had previously interacted with blind IBM employees in some capacity. People here are focused on my abilities and what I have to offer because personal experience tells them my disability is not an issue. It's helped me define what I want and pursue it," Mike says.

Today as a manager, Mike gives his employees the kind of advice he probably wishes someone had given him years ago, "I tell my employees, 'You have to tell me what you want. Tell the world what you want, so people can help you find the opportunities you need.' Almost everything I've learned about being a manager, I've learned by doing. If you wait until you're 100 percent ready, you'll never make the move." Now that's vision.

http://www-03.ibm.com/able/news/ching.html

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