Virtual Grace Hopper Celebration, a personal summary

The Grace Hopper Celebration is the world’s largest gathering of women technologist. This event is annually organized by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and the Association for Computing Machinery. This year (2021) was held virtually during the last week of September. Since this was my first time attending, I would like to share my experience:

Research talks: The event is full of women that are either in the Academia or the Industry, they can be students, Professors, Entrepreneurs, Activists, or Executives. I personally feel attracted to the Academia side, so I attended the poster sessions and an interesting talk by Dr. Catherine Schuman who used Intelligent Automation at the edge to improve fuel efficiency. In this talk, I learned how a specific type of neural networks can be more efficient than reinforcement learning for certain hardware and environment. Sometimes looking how other fields implement tools can be helpful to develop future ideas.

Job Hunting: I haven’t experienced a Grace Hopper Celebration in person; however, I think that the virtual component this year was a boost. We could enjoy virtual booths of dozens of companies which allow us go back and forth quickly to ask questions. I scheduled a couple of 1:1 meetings with Disney Enterprise Technology and Disney Control Systems. These meetings are helpful if you want to know details of a specific area of the company as well as the first-hand employee experience. I was able to practice my elevator speech to a recruiter and get guidance on the areas of Disney that I could apply. Additionally, I attended the Amazon webinar where I could discuss my common interests with the company and get a follow up. This webinar was particularly helpful because during the day you could have recruiters, employees from different roles answering general and specific questions about roles, recruitment process, etc.

Building a community: There were a lot of opportunities to network with women sharing familiar situations or questions. As a Latina studying the Ph.D. in the U.S. I wanted to meet women like me, so I joined the Latinas in Technical Roles Lounge where I found a group of inspiring Latinas working in technology. We could connect during the session and via LinkedIn later. Also, I learned about the Latinas in Computing organization which I hope I can get involved with them in the future.

The Grace Hopper Celebration is a great opportunity to connect with women technologists around the world, to search for a job or show your work and experience. I would like to thank the UCI Braid organization for this opportunity, it was an enriching and life-changing experience.