Danika Soberano

March 25, 2021 - Danika Soberano was born in Bacolod City, Philippines. She attended a mainstream school, but she was unable to understand any of the subjects except for math because of the language barrier - she could not understand the Filipino Language at all. Despite this, Danika was a top student in her math classes. Her mother discovered her daughter’s deafness when Danika was two years old. “The doctor was against Sign Language and suggested to my mom that she provide me with speech therapy.” Danika and her mother would take the ferry to another island called Ilo Ilo City, an hour away from Bacolod City, where they lived, for speech therapy four times a week. It didn’t work out as planned for them, so Danika’s mom moved the family to America when Danika was eight years old. They arrived in Minnesota in 2006. At that time, Danika had no knowledge of English as well. “I took speech therapy since then and became aware of English when I was 11.” Upon completion from high school, Danika attended Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, majoring in electrical engineering technology. She went there “because of access accommodation.” She graduated from RIT in December 2020. 

Danika works as an Integration and Test Engineer at L3Harris Technologies in New Jersey. Her job is to support software development and integration for test hardware from electronic warfare systems. Her primary responsibility is working on LabVIEW to create and correct the drivers to ensure that it runs successfully. Additionally, Danika helps the engineers to test through the procedures for different kinds of programs.

She enjoys working with several co-workers and getting to know each other. “Also, I always get excited to learn something new that I hadn’t learned from my school. I was inspired to pursue engineering because I grew up watching my grandpa fixing things at his workshop. He would fix my toys and kites whenever they get pierced by the tree branches. He was my inspiration throughout my childhood and always used to be eager to help others.”

At L3Harris Technologies, as the only deaf engineer, Danika is used to facing a lot of challenging obstacles. Despite not having an interpreter in classified areas, she would Skype through the classified computer to communicate with others and always bring the Boogie Board (a mobile refreshable blackboard) with her so that the team would not waste paper on communication. “The interpreters are required to be requested for any kind of events such as meetings in only unclassified areas. It can be done in either VRI or in-person interpreting.”

Danika shares the following advice: “show people what you can do despite having hearing loss. Try to be open-minded on your own in order to interact with people.”

Outside of work, Danika enjoys traveling and doing photography. She also used to draw a lot as a student in high school, but the drawing hobby went on hiatus in college due to a hectic schedule, and she hopes to pick it up again when her schedule clears up.  

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!