Attending: TechGirl Mentorship Afternoon
Back in May, I had the honour of winning the TechGirl award, check out my article on it! My idea was to use BCIs (brain-computer interfaces) to measure the focus levels of students and then leverage AI to change the teaching style used for the students to accelerate learning.
As part of the award, I was granted the opportunity to have a mentor to support my journey through technology. Over the past few months, we have been working closely to achieve my goals. Recently, I was invited to an afternoon to talk to all the TechGirl winners alongside the mentors who have helped all of us!
The afternoon began with Peter Stojanovic, the editor of HotTopics sharing the vision for the future of TechGirl. It was exciting to see how this initiative is really focused on increasing diversity in the technology space- something that is very much needed in the present day.
This was followed by an extremely insightful speech from Donia Kaloussi & Yessi Bello Perez, who are employees at LinkedIn. Learning about all the interesting features of LinkedIn fascinated me, alongside the ways that anyone can build their personal brand online.
My 3 key takeaways:
- Post regularly — To grow your audience, it’s paramount that you post regularly so more people are drawn in.
- Be authentic — If anything, people want to see who you truly are to know if you are truly fit to work closely alongside them. You can display your authenticity throughout your profile, like in your profile picture or in your posts.
- Provide value — You want to make your posts worth your audience’s time, so always reflect that throughout your posts. It will keep people drawn to your posts AND you will be bettering the quality of your audience’s lives.
The biggest action item I would take away from this is to just post, no matter how daunting it seems!
After this, I was able to talk to some outstanding women working in technology! It was incredible to hear about the experiences of Charlotte Baldwin (the CIO of Costa Coffee) throughout her career and it was amazing to see how passionate she was about helping young girls in technology. Christina Scott, the CTO & CPO of OVO Energy, was such a pleasure to talk to as she was often curious about the winners and what she could provide to help us! Additionally, Jyotsna Chandrani who works as the director of operational and resilience risk tooling at HSBC, was an amazing woman to talk to as she expressed her experience in the field during COVID as an employee, mother and worker. It was so inspiring to hear the stories of all of these amazing women working in the technology field and see how they were all willing to help us grow. This really gave me the confidence that my ideas had the potential to be impactful!
We finished up the day with some table tennis to relax and it was a great way to get to know the other winners of the competition. Everyone’s ideas were so creative and it was amazing to see how many girls were so excited about upcoming technologies.
Thanks for reading. If you are interested or have any questions, please email me at neha.adapala@gmail.com
Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neha-adapala-7b2a56231/
And X: https://twitter.com/neha_adapala
You can apply to be a TechGirl here: https://hottopics.ht/techgirl-competition
