When 2024 Council Scholarship recipient Marin Gundlach first got her hands on an iPod Shuffle at age 5, she says she immediately became interested in technology. That was when the Belleville native, who has been blind since birth, first encountered VoiceOver technology that allowed her to fully utilize the music device. “Finding that really opened up the world to me, and I immediately became very interested in all sorts of technology,” Marin says. “I’ve always been passionate about accessibility and learning as much as I can about it.”
Years later when she was a freshman at the Wisconsin Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Janesville, Marin was still interested in accessible technology and joined the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow STEM competition. Teaming up with a teacher, she utilized Navilens technology throughout her school to create physical tags that could be scanned with a phone. The phone would then read aloud descriptions and messages to help with navigation, read signs, and otherwise describe the environment. Marin and her team placed in the semifinals for the competition and won $15,000 in technology for her school.
It’s no wonder then that Marin decided to study technology and accessibility when she enrolled at Madison Area Technical College (MATC) earlier this fall. “Working on the Solve for Tomorrow competition really showed me that there are people out there who care about accessibility, and people are looking for new solutions. They just need that push,” she says. Marin plans to continue her education at a UW campus once she finishes two years at MATC.
Marin spent most of her high school years at the Wisconsin Center, where class sizes were small and designed for students with vision loss. So when it became time to start thinking about college, she decided she needed to leave her safety net behind and enrolled at Belleville High School to get a better idea of what a world without as much built-in accessibility would be like. While learning a new school and attending classes with up to four times as many students felt a little overwhelming at first, things got easier over time.
Marin says spending her senior year at Belleville taught her things that will help her in the years to come, such as how to advocate for herself. In the beginning of the school year, Marin felt herself struggling to follow along with one of her classes. Instead of giving up, Marin asked to meet regularly with her teacher after class to make sure she wasn’t missing anything.
Marin says she is grateful for the Council Scholarship, which will go toward tuition costs for her first semester of college. “The scholarship really pushes me toward success and gives me encouragement to finish college and do what I want to do,” Marin says.
The Council has been awarding scholarships to postsecondary students who are blind or low vision for decades. You can find more information about our scholarship program at WCBlind.org/Events/Scholarships.
