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I'm Sharon Wong and I'm working here in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion
at OPM. I have been here at OPM
about 4 or 5 months now. What I do here in the Office of Diversity and
Inclusion I look at my job as facilitating the creation
of a diverse workforce and an inclusive workplace where
everybody can perform at your maximum potential.
When we talk about diversity, diversity is about
all ways that we are distinct and unique
individuals. So I look at diversity in its broadest sense,
every individual is unique, every individual is the diverse and these
backgrounds, these different backgrounds and perspectives, that people bring
into the workplace for us to be able too
effectively utilize this to get our work done. I am passionate about this job
because
I get to see change in me. I actually started my career as an engineer,
as a software engineer at Kennedy Space Center for NASA
I worked on ground systems checkout systems
for flight hardware and I got
into the diversity including role just because
even though I as an engineer on the outside I was very involved in
diversity organizations on a collateral basis. It's
been a passion of mine for, oh gosh, probably
twenty thirty years. I was actually born and raised in Jamaica.
The country, not Jamaica, New York. People always
associate that. My parents are of Chinese descent,
3 of my grandparents came from, what used to be,
Canton, China moved to Jamaica. My parents were born there, I was born there and
then migrated to the US. The interesting part of that is I went straight from Jamaica
to college in West Virginia.
You can imagine how different
that was and that probably also is what accounts for my taste in music,
I'm a avid country-western music. I have a pickup truck.
That's the beauty of diversity. People look at me would never think
I listen country music, I got a pickup truck.
It's just I think this again, when I talked about earlier, get to know people
just the beauty when you get to know someone, you
find the vastness of their uniqueness.