National Technical Institute for the Deaf

Stacy Bick writes, directs and produces videos for a living, but her career “Aha!” moment was completely unscripted.

As a junior at a mainstream high school in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Bick visited a local television station to compete in a contest. While other students nervously waited for the contest to start, Bick found the studio and began asking anyone she could find questions about television production. She was, she admits, very curious.

She ended up working at that station for several years before coming to RIT to pursue a degree in Film/Video. In 1999, she became the first deaf student to graduate from RIT’s School of Film and Animation program. One year later, she received her master’s degree in Cross Disciplinary Professional Studies.

Bick’s supervisors in NTID’s video department, where she worked as a student, encouraged her to attend an NTID Job Fair when she began job hunting.

Only one television station—Fox Rochester WUHF-31—came to the fair, and Bick, who says that being an NTID student taught her to advocate for herself, “made a beeline across that room to meet the station representative.”

She was hired as a production director and stayed for a year and a half, during which she created more than 300 commercials. She returned to NTID in 2001 as a video producer/director.

Bick loves the variety of her work—this spring she was juggling nearly two dozen projects—and also teaches a Videography II class in the Arts & Imaging Studies Department.

“My goal,” she says, “is to give students practical experience that will make them good candidates for jobs. “

Of the hundreds of projects she has worked on in the past 10 years, her favorite is a promotional video she created to publicize the NTID Center on Employment Job Fair, the same fair where she got her start in the field.

"I was searching for a place where I could grow personally and professionally," says Bick. "I found that at NTID/RIT."