Lessons from my dream job
“What can we do to make this the best internship ever for you?”
When I was asked this question in my interview for the Marketing and Growth Lead position at Access to Success, I wanted the job 10 times more — and I already was undeniably passionate about the work Access to Success was doing. After all, this job was instrumental in driving social impact in Canada AND it was in marketing- a field I was trying to break into. Even in the interview I realized that the founders were extremely passionate about the organization and its mission. I saw this passion through the years of volunteer work and Access to Success’ President, Varun Chandak’s dedication to run the organization along with working a full time corporate job.
I was lucky enough to receive an offer for the position and have spent the last 4 months working at Access to Success. Mainly I worked on ATS Labs - Canada’s first accelerator for accessibility, mental health, and aging tech startups. In this role I got to drive social impact by connecting founders with the resources to scale their startups.
This internship was a rare role in an exciting space. So before I end my term this December, I thought ’d share a couple of key takeaways from my time at Access to Success.
Making accessible content
Throughout my internship I worked on maintaining and growing Access to Success’ social media presence on LinkedIn and Twitter. One of my biggest takeaways is how to make accessible content and why it’s important. Before stepping into my role, I knew alt text as the text that appears on an image when your internet is slow and the webpage won’t fully load. I never considered its other uses like if someone is using a screen reader to browse Twitter, they wouldn’t be able to see an image that I post along with a tweet. To make this content accessible I can add alt text to the graphic describing what the image looks like.
Another key point is that everyone benefits from accessibility. For example, adding closed captions to a video not only helps people who are deaf or hard of hearing but also may benefit people with certain learning disabilities.
There are many other reasons for making your content accessible including: 15% of the world’s population has a disability (over 1 billion people), legal compliance, or my personal favourite — it’s the right thing to do.
Your network is your net worth
We’ve all heard it, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Although I would argue that the team behind Access to Success know their stuff too — they were able to bring in 50 incredible speakers from around the world to speak with the startups. In nearly every one of these sessions, networking was brought up in one way or another.
Networking always seemed so intimidating to me. Why would a professional want to meet with me, a university student with not much value to offer them? I expressed these concerns to a friend one day, to which she replied, “10 years down the line if you have a professional career in marketing, would you be willing to help out someone who had the same aspirations you once did?” Of course I would help them out and offer any advice I can. My friend explained that it’s the same idea and it’s likely that many of the professionals I reach out to have done the same thing before. This definitely eased some worries I had about networking and encouraged me to simply be myself.
Throughout my term I was introduced to many changemakers in the accessibility space. Learning from them and getting to ask my questions filled a gap in my knowledge that I could only learn from those who have been there and done that.
Next steps
As for me, I’ll be returning to Wilfrid Laurier University come January to finish the 4th year of my Business Administration degree. My experience at Access to Success has been an unforgettable one that has taught me countless lessons to carry with me on my next adventures. There’s still a lot of unfinished work in this space. It doesn’t sit right with me that accessibility is sometimes considered an extra feature and is priced at a premium. Not to mention having to request said accommodations can be an invasion of privacy (I’m looking at you Zoom).
If there’s one thing I want you to get out of reading this post it’s that the time to make a change is now. I dream of a world in which accessibility is the default, not an afterthought. But why should this world exist just as a figment of my imagination? There are millions of disabled people who are unemployed that can bring their lived experience to your organization. There are no more excuses for being inaccessible. We have the resources, what’s the holdup?
The time is now and the changemakers are all of us. I hope you will stay updated with the incredible work being done by the folks at Access to Success. Join them on their journey to enable everyone.
Stay in touch!
You can follow Access to Success’ work on LinkedIn and Twitter.
