What is your name?
Joshua Malos

How old are you?
18 years old

What city and state do you live in?
Corvalis, OR

What years and grades did you attend Tucker Maxon?
Pre-K through 2nd grade.

Did you have a favorite teacher or staff member?
Jerry, Patty, everyone.

What caused your hearing loss?
I was born deaf.

What kind of tools do you use to support your hearing today?
Bilateral Implants.

Do you use sign/ASL?
No.

How has hearing loss impacted your life or the life of people close to you?
Other than having a family that is probably louder than average, I don’t think it has impacted my life much!

What did you study in college, and/or what kind of work do you do, or want to do?
I’m going to study engineering at OSU this fall. I’d like to be an electrical or mechanical engineer.

Please share an accomplishment you are especially proud of. 
I’m proud of graduating, going to Israel this summer, and starting college at OSU in the fall. 

What is your favorite place you’ve traveled to?
I love going to the Oregon Dunes to go riding.

What do you look forward to most each day?
Going to bed so I can take off my implants.

Please share something you learned as a student at Tucker Maxon that has stayed with you ever since.
Tucker taught me about community, about being welcoming and giving…it just oozes out of Tucker. I think I spent hundreds of hours in the Audiology office, to the point where Kim, the audiologist at the time, made a mark on the wall for me to focus on. It is probably still there!

Any words of advice for today’s Tucker Maxon students (hearing impaired, typical, or both)?
Give your teachers less of a hard time than I did, and enjoy yourself! Really awesome people work at Tucker Maxon. The last time I visited Tucker, I saw preschool teacher Michelle Proctor. She was with a new preschool teacher, and mentioned something about being a crazy child, and the new teacher said, “Oh, that’s you?!”