June 20, 2019 - Illinois born and Minnesota raised, Andrew Palmberg was born Deaf into a hearing family. Fortunately, his mom was a special education teacher at the time and later went back to school to obtain her Master’s degree in becoming a Deaf and Hard of Hearing teacher. His family and relatives also took the time to learn ASL so they could communicate with him. His family moved from Illinois to Minnesota to seek out better education opportunities for him.
Andrew is an architectural drafter at Doran Companies, a developer firm in Bloomington, Minnesota. He enjoys designing projects on the computer and seeing them come to fruition when the buildings are actually built. He is currently working on a project that he and his architectural team has been drafting for the last 2 years called, “The Expo,” a 25 stories high rise apartment building which is being constructed currently near downtown Minneapolis.
A barrier that Andrew faces in his workplace is that he uses an app called Ava which translates voice into text so that he can understand what his colleagues are saying during weekly work team meetings. However, Andrew says the translations are only about 70% accurate which occasionally causes misunderstandings and conversations being missed. Fortunately, most of the time he’s able to figure out what the app missed based on the context of the conversation and his co-worker awareness of speaking one at a time for Andrew. His workplace also provides in-person ASL interpreters for the company’s quarterly meetings as well as all-companies meetings.
Andrew’s advice is to be patient and to accept that sometimes you have to take jobs that are not in your intended field or not the job you wanted as a “foot-in-the-door” to your career of choice. He attended the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee where he got a bachelor’s degree in architecture. Upon graduation, he did not find a career in architecture and instead held several positions before being hired at Doran. Before becoming an architectural drafter at Doran, Andrew worked for the Minnesota Commission for the Deaf, DeafBlind, and Hard of Hearing (MNCDHH) and for the Minnesota Department of Transportation. The connections he made with his former colleagues and supervisors at his previous jobs gave him the opportunity to connect and meet a person who worked at Doran, who then gave Andrew the opportunity to interview at Doran and that’s how he got his current job.
The #CanDoAnything campaign showcases people who are deaf, deafblind, or hard of hearing at work, giving them an opportunity to share what they do at their jobs and explain how communication access works for them. This campaign shows what our community can do, which is anything!
