Biography

Ms. Rebecca Rose Orton, otherwise known simply as Reba Orton, was born Deaf.   She attended Cornell College with its intensive one class a month schedule for the freshman year and by the end of the academic year, she was taking computer science classes that juniors usually took.  However, for the rest of her college years at the University of Northern Iowa, she wisely kept a healthy balance between general education and major courses every semester because switching between subjects while studying was equivalent to getting a mental break.  When she completed her Bachelor of Arts degree in Computer Science in May, 1990, she had completed every course for her major in the university catalog except one.  That one class was Project Management and she never registered for it because she feared that she would not be able to interact with her hearing teammates on an assigned project that they would work on together for the entire semester.  After she graduated, she worked for seven years as a COBOL computer programmer in the aerospace and insurance industries.  During her lifetime, she took pride in having studied or worked with many computer languages such as ADA, ANSI COBOL, C+, BASIC, COBOL II, FORTRAN 77, HTML, Icon, LISP, MicroFocus COBOL, Pascal, PDP-11 assembly language, Perl, QBASIC, Turbo Pascal, and Visual Basic Applications (VBA).  It is quite logical to think of computer languages as constructed languages, and indeed, a linguistics class covering government and binding theories had a familiar programmatic writing style in its textbook.  She was one of the only two people who got top grades in this class at Gallaudet University.  She graduated from Gallaudet University in May, 2000 with a Master of Arts degree in Linguistics with a specialization in non-manual signals (e.g. facial expressions used in American Sign Language grammar).  She worked part-time as a tutor for about fifteen years after she graduated.  While tutoring students with business administration majors and other related fields, she found that she had a penchant for business, just like her father.  She took a Management and Organizational Theory class at the University of Maryland University College in Fall, 2006.  She got the top score for her final exam.  To finally complete that one project management class that she did not take for her undergraduate degree, she took a Project Management for Beginners professional development class in July, 2009 at Gallaudet University in a fully accessible classroom with peers who all communicated in American Sign Language.  It was effortless to team up with classmates for project management assignments!