Nicole Enderica, '16

"I currently work as a Communications Specialist at Vision for Equality. We are a small local nonprofit organization that works to assist and empower people with disabilities and their families to seek quality and satisfaction in their lives as well as equal access to supports and services. We mainly support the Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities community as well as the Autism community in the Philadelphia area. I focus on a couple of tasks such as developing marketing and promotion material for communications and fundraising purposes. I design most of our resource, training and educational pieces, whether they are print or digital, including our quarterly newsletter. I have the advantage to be able to translate most of these piece to Spanish for our Latino community. I am also in charge of keeping our website and Facebook page up to date and making a few changes here and there. What I love about my job is the amount of faith and trust my bosses and supervisors put in me, they never doubt my abilities and they trust I'll give them my all. They are always looking to educate me about they are fighting for. The women I work with are passionate and have accomplished so much within this community, it is impossible not to look up to them and hope to be like them some day. "

"The COM department opened up a whole new world for me, particularly the Beautiful Social Research Collaborative. I always knew I wanted to have a job that in some way created an impact on people's lives but I did not know how to do it. I thought nonprofit work was unpaid and all volunteer but I quickly realized it is not. The skills I developed during my time in the COM department have helped me immensely at work: basic HTML skills, WordPress, storytelling through social media, InDesign, Illustrator I have used everyday for the past year. But the one thing the COM department taught me that has led me the furthest is DIY Learning, I like to think I have mastered the art of researching and understating tutorials, even in a different language just to get something accomplished. The Internet is powerful and resourceful."