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Jack
Chen
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“Travelling to work is kind of like
running 10 miles before you even get to the start of the marathon. There’s
always a lot of dynamic objects moving, people moving throughout Penn station
rushing to get where they’re going — their noses are in their phone. They’re
not looking at where they’re going so I have to compensate for that.”
Chen, who has degrees in computer
science from both Harvard and Berkeley, is Google’s product counsel and
oversees legal matters related to Chrome. As a child, he had limited eyesight, but
was able to see light and make out colors and vague shapes.
“I generally couldn’t see cars and
had to pretty much rely on my sense of sound to alert me if there was one
coming. Thankfully electric cars weren’t popular back then.”
When he was 16, Chen underwent his
eighth or ninth surgery in hopes of improving his sight. He lost his vision
completely as a result of complications during the operation.
“My optic nerve was damaged in
earlier operations in one eye. In the remaining eye, during a critical part of
the operation, my head involuntarily moved, and there was some hemorrhaging. My
retina broke apart.”
Though he lost his sense of sight, Chen
didn’t let that stop him from achieving academic and professional success. He
interned at AT&T and went on to be a systems engineer at Xanboo Inc., a New
York-based startup involving internet home security systems. After earning his
J.D. degree at Fordham Law School, Chen worked for two years as a patent and
trademark attorney in New York law firms.
In 2010, he came on board as
Google’s associate patent counsel. For six years, Chen has been making his
daily commute using the four-foot radius of information he receives with his
cane.
According to Chen, his biggest
obstacles are poles and columns that he encounters in Penn Station. He
navigates his route to work using the mental map he’s memorized as well as
other cues
“I also use smells to tell me where
I am. I pass by a coffee place and the Subway sandwich place, and those are
smell landmarks to let me know that I have properly made that left turn and am
heading to the subway.”
For most of his life, Chen has had
to problem solve without depending on his vision. He relies on his auditory
senses to get his work done by using a screen reader and the VoiceOver function
on his iPhone to read text out loud.
However, Chen admits that as a
lawyer having every word read out loud to you can be quite time consuming. To
speed things up, he sets the technology to read at 620 words per minute, a pace
that sounds like gibberish to untrained ears.
Outside of work, Chen maintains a
very active and adventurous lifestyle. In 2012, he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, the
tallest mountain in Tanzania, Africa.
“I wanted to test myself, but I
didn’t have a lot of time to work on learning climbing techniques. I figured if
I liked it, I could get into the gear later and try other peaks.”
Source : nextshark.com
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