Peggy Li – Duke Grace Hopper Conference 2012

October 13, 2012October 14, 2012

Peggy: Day 3 Reflections

Today was the last full day of the conference since we’ll be waking up at (or before?) the crack of dawn tomorrow morning to fly back to North Carolina. I was able to sleep in a little more today since the first event started later compared to yesterday; given how intense and tiring this conference has been (though nothing short of amazing), I definitely appreciated the extra hour!

The morning started with a keynote by Anita Young; it’s cool how things have gone full circle since she was also the speaker at the first Grace Hopper Conference! She spoke about the IT revolution, and how unlike previous revolutions, this one is focused as much on personal apps as on infrastructure alone. She also mentioned how the new topic this year was massive open online courses or MOOCs such as Coursera; since I’m taking a peer and academic leadership course that has also discussed MOOCs as a new force of disruptive innovation in education, it was great hearing it mentioned in another situation.

I chose to attend a talk on agile development (“Go Lean, Go Agile – Are we there yet?”). Although agile was briefly discussed by my Software Design professor in the spring, I haven’t had much exposure to it yet, but I’ve frequently heard of it as an important methodology in software development these days and was really interested in learning more. After hearing panelists from several companies, including Mario (an agile coach), I feel like I have a moderately better understanding of agile, and am looking forward to having an opportunity to use it in practice someday.

I returned to the Career Fair for a while to speak to several companies I hadn’t had a chance to speak with yet, and while there, bumped into a friend from another college whom I’d met two summers ago doing CS research! We had lunch together at the food court and caught up on what we were each doing, so meeting her there was a pleasant surprise! After lunch was a plenary talk on Technology Government. Since most of the conference has confused on industry and academia so far, it was interesting to hear from the government perspective and of course about the problems like security that the government confronts.

Then I went to my final two sessions for this conference: “The Future of Online Social Networking” and “Are we ready for the next level yet? Perspectives from junior women in technology” (which talked about career advancement for women, e.g. lower promotion rates compared to men). I had to slip out a few minutes early since I was joining others for dinner.

Dinner itself was an interesting affair – it turned out to be me, another undergrad from Duke, a graduate student from Duke, a professor from Duke, the friend from UMBC, a Stanford professor, and a Stanford student! We ended up eating at a pretty nice restaurant (turns out it was by reservation so we ended up sitting at the bar) – so the food was absolutely delicious!

Last but not least… the RockIT Science and Systers 25th Anniversary Celebration held at Maryland Science Center! We were pretty tired by late evening and didn’t stay very long, but the party was really energetic and everyone looked to be having a great time (in fact, I noticed a few teenage guys on the Harbor trying to crash the party). So many cupcakes and desserts, and free shirts from Google and Microsoft – how will I pack all this swag tonight??

All in all, the past couple of days have been exhausting in the best possible way! I think Grace Hopper was quite an eye-opening experience in seeing how many women are in technology and realizing how large the community really is. I truly had a great time and was really inspired by the people there, and thank all of the sponsors who made this opportunity possible!

October 13, 2012October 14, 2012

Peggy: Day 2 Reflections

Rose and shone early this morning for a breakfast reception courtesy of Yahoo! One of the Yahoo! engineers spoke about her work developing gaming platforms; her enthusiasm (especially at 7 am!) was incredibly evident and I really enjoyed hearing about how her job has allowed her to focus on an area she’s passionate about.

Afterwards was the Keynote speech delivered by Nora Denzel, which I found to be absolutely phenomenal. Despite speaking to an audience of thousands, she seemed very personable and engaging, and I really enjoyed hearing her speak about her personal experiences working in industry.

I attended two different talks, the first on “Creativty, Learning, and Social Software” by Lily Cheng (Microsoft Research) and the second on “From Engineer to Executive: the Path Forward” by Susan Zwinger (Oracle). I was surprised but impressed to learn about the scope of Microsoft’s research projects, and I especially appreciated the second talk. After reading about Sheryl Sandberg and “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” by Anne-Marie Slaughter over the summer, I was very interested in learning how successful women balance top-notch careers with family and personal life, so this topic was great as it touched upon her work-life balance, though I was a little surprised that she also talked fairly extensively about understanding one’s personality type. She talked about a friend who had planned out her life (from her career and even salary to her marriage and family) back in college – and actually achieved it all; of course, this isn’t the norm for many people, but it was still fascinating to hear.

I then had an interview with a company that I had arranged prior to the interview, and attended a session on “Six Reasons Male Influencers Advocate for Technical Women”. This one presented some research findings that sought to understand what motivated technical men to support technical women. Two of the panelists were male leaders from large tech companies, and it was pretty inspirational to hear them talk about how they tried to understand and improve the gender ratios on their teams. Even though the focus of the conference is on bringing together a community of women, I’m really glad that the organizers decided to bring in a male perspective since I was personally quite curious about the extent to which men might support the technical women’s agenda.

The evening involved another interview, followed by “heavy hors d’oeuvres” (read: dinner) – the pasta was delicious, by the way! Then was the awards ceremony, which was very exciting. I found the speeches by the Change Agents and Social Impact award winners to be especially inspirational, since these women are literally effecting change and improving lives around the world. What an amazing group of women!

October 13, 2012October 14, 2012

Peggy: Day 1 Reflections

We flew up to Baltimore in the morning and checked into our hotels. Since not everybody from Duke was on the same flight and staying at the hotel, it took a little longer to sort out the logistics. On the bright side, our room at the Sheraton is really nice, and the hotel is under a ten-minute walk from the Baltimore Convention Center where the Grace Hopper conference is being held.

Even in the hotel lobby where we were waiting, I started to notice women carrying the blue Grace Hopper conference bag for this year, and the numbers only increased as we headed to the BCC in the afternoon. Although I knew there would be over 3000 attendees so the attendance wasn’t necessarily a surprise, it was still remarkable to see so many women, from students to industry representatives to professors. It was really exciting to finally register and receive my Grace Hopper bag and name tag!

After lunch with a few other Duke students at the food court, we decided to attend a panel talk called “How to Optimize Your Job Search” together. All in all, it was pretty good, although I personally felt that the emphasis for most of the concrete tips revolved around LinkedIn and networking, and I would have liked to hear more about, say, websites or events to be on the lookout for when career searching.

On my way down an escalator later, I accidentally bumped into a woman who I assumed was a college professor attending the conference – it turns out that she was the conference director, oops!

My evening was spent at the Career Fair, which included practically every large tech company I could think of as well as numerous graduate school programs from universities across the country. It was honestly a little overwhelming and intimidating at first, but after visiting several booths, I began to feel more comfortable speaking with recruiters and engineers alike and coming up with questions that I wanted to ask. I had an interview with one company that I had set up prior to arrival, but enjoyed having the rest of the time to learn more about different companies and of course, collecting some free swag!

About Me: I’m a junior at Duke majoring in Computer Science and Economics. This was my first (and hopefully not last) time attending the Grace Hopper Conference.