Keenan Gao was born in China in December 1993. Her father first came to the United States on a scholarship to study for a Ph.D. at Virginia Tech. Then Keenan and her mother immigrated when she was 1.5 years old. In the U.S., her parents discovered that she was hard of hearing, and Keenan was fitted for hearing aids. Keenan's mother told her that she didn’t understand English during her very first hearing test, so she had to translate it into Chinese. Commands like “turn the cup upside down and put it on this toy” got translated to “give the toy a hat to wear” so she could understand. At the time, the entire family lived off her father’s PhD stipend and was tremendously lucky that university healthcare insurance covered everything.
She grew up mainstreamed in school all her life and spent many hours in speech therapy. Her parents were never exposed to sign language — her audiologists and speech pathologists never even said the word sign language to them. “They did not even know it existed.” In Keenan’s early years, she benefited from an FM system, but that was no longer an accommodation offered to her as she grew up. Her father recalls that when she was in sixth grade, the school wanted to take her off the IEP plan and stop offering accommodations because “my grades were too good.” Her father had to fight and go through a lot of paperwork to keep the accommodations in place, and he argued with the principal. “It’s because of the accommodations that I did well.”
In September 2019, Keenan began learning ASL at St. Paul Community College. A year later, she underwent surgery for a cochlear implant in her right ear. She decided to do a cochlear implant at the same time as learning sign language to make sure she is trying out all of the available resources and put herself in “a position where I can create as many opportunities for myself as I can.” Keenan’s parents heavily emphasized Chinese fluency at home, and she has experienced the huge benefits of bilingualism. “I am confident and close to my Chinese identity even though I grew up in the USA. My experiences have convinced me that if parents prioritize one identity over the other, then that is isolating their child from communities, resources, and opportunities that belong to them. As a result, all deaf and hard of hearing babies need a strong foundation in both ASL and English from birth. Parents can never predict the opportunities that open up due to having ASL access, even if the child grows up fully mainstreamed and appears well-integrated into hearing culture.”
Since September 2021, Keenan has been working in two roles, one at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and one in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Her primary role in Minneapolis is model validation, where she assesses the conceptual soundness of quantitative models used in the Federal Reserve System’s stress testing program. Through model validation work, Keenan ensures the safety and soundness of the nation’s financial and banking system. “After the financial crisis, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act of Stress Testing. One of the provisions was that each year, the Federal Reserve has to conduct a “stress test” on bank portfolios. The Fed collects portfolio-level and loan-level information from large bank holding companies and designs various macroeconomic scenarios to represent a distressed economic environment.” The Federal Reserve System builds stress testing models that try to project how much banks would lose in these scenarios. This role takes advantage of Keenan’s background in mathematical and coding skills because she needs to analyze data and evaluate the performance of different statistical, economic, and mathematical models. “Since the models are across various asset classes, everything from sovereign debt to Treasury securities to derivative products, I am constantly studying and learning new things.”
Each year, Keenan typically assesses between four and five models. For some models, she goes into a deep dive and rigorous evaluation of whether the model was well-designed and well-tested. “For other models where I have already done a deep dive, I evaluate whether or not the model is continuing to perform well since it was developed. Since the Fed’s hypothetical scenarios are designed for extreme scenarios, I have to ensure that we communicate when the model performs well and when it doesn’t, such as the circumstances in which different assumptions may fail. I look at the accuracy and stability of the model’s projections and review how the economic and regulatory environment changes to understand where model risk might pop up. For example, do we have new financial products that the model might not perform well on? Have the portfolios of some banks gotten significantly riskier over time, and does our model sufficiently capture that risk? There are many questions, and my job is a rewarding intellectual exercise.”
Through a rotation program within the Fed, Keenan worked as a trading analyst on the Agency MBS Trading Desk in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where she was involved in the Fed’s large-scale asset purchases of mortgage-backed securities. In the trading role, Keenan set up auctions where different dealers could make offers on how much they wanted to sell each lot of Agency MBS. Since the Federal Reserve is such a large player in financial markets, she must monitor how the market responds to the Fed’s actions. Keenan also needs to contact different dealers to get their view on market conditions and how the Fed’s purchases are impacting them to understand what kind of adjustments need to be made for trading activities.
At work, Keenan faced various accessibility barriers but was surrounded by extremely supportive managers and coworkers who worked together to knock down barriers. Every day, she has conference and video calls that discuss highly-classified information calls with other regional Federal Reserve Banks across the country, the Board of Governors, and various primary dealers. The biggest challenge is ensuring each organization understands the accommodations needed and for everyone to ensure the security of the information being discussed. Keenan uses both CART and ASL interpreting services for her calls, and each organization must undergo a long process of doing security clearance for the different stenographers and interpreters. During the pandemic, there was high demand for CART/ASL interpreting services, and Keenan could not always get accommodations. As a backup, Keenan’s manager and senior leadership at the Minneapolis Fed worked extremely hard to get emergency approval to use auto-captions, which also involved clearing a lot of hurdles.
Keenan shares some advice with the community on self-advocacy: “if you expect your coworkers to magically know what accommodations you need, or what is the best way to communicate with you, then you set both of you up for failure.” She leads into communication by “Have as many conversations with people as possible. Around the office, in your field, not in your field. Be curious about the different kinds of jobs out there.” She also stresses the importance of having folks who one can look up to and learn from: “Find informal mentors/role models.”
She also has some mental health advice to share with anybody “who is also the first to ‘make it to the table’ in their field. Being the first is exhausting. Really really exhausting. First of all… congratulate yourself. Second, it is important to see yourself in the context of where you are. For so long, I didn’t give full credit to my struggles because I would compare myself to hearing people. I didn’t recognize that because I need to spend extra energy and time to overcome accessibility barriers and educate coworkers, I need twice as long to recover and rest. Being the “first” in your field or area means people will see you as a pioneer and trailblazer, but it also means it doesn’t stop! You will continuously have to be the first to break down all of the barriers that come ahead, so that others can come after you. The road ahead will be a marathon, and it is important to make sure you are taking care of yourself — emotionally, mentally, socially, physically. Eventually, you may also hit a point where you have to take a step back and ask yourself whether you are thriving or surviving. If you are not thriving, then you need to take a chance to figure out what changes you need in your current environment to enable yourself to thrive or find another environment.”
Her biggest advice is to carefully protect a person's emotional energy and time outside of work. “Exercise the muscle of saying no to things that you don’t need to do, and don’t want to do. If there are things you do want to do but don’t have energy, then that is okay, and don’t judge yourself. Take the extra time that you need. Are you finding others who share your identities, who can understand what you are going through? Are your social situations fully accessible, or are you having to spend extra energy navigating inaccessible social situations? Do you have a therapist to help take care of your mental health? Are you getting enough sleep each night, eating right, and exercising? Learn to set and enforce boundaries.”
Outside work, Keenan is an avid gardener and enjoys trying new cooking recipes. She enjoys bouldering, snowboarding, and photography. She teaches snowboarding lessons in ASL at Hyland Hills and founded a rock climbing summer camp at Minneapolis Bouldering Project for Deaf and hard of hearing youth. She also advocates for open captions at movie theaters throughout Minnesota.
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!
