8 Lessons From 8 Conferences
A reflection of all my trips in 2019
This past year, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend 8 different conferences. I’ve grown so much from all the places I’ve visited, all the talks I’ve attended, and all the people I’ve met. I’ve decided to share a lesson that I’ve learned from each of those conferences to help others make the best of the conferences that they attend.
1. Do more than attend the conference sessions.
IEEE Rising Stars
Rising Stars holds a special place in my heart because it was the first conference that I ever attended. In 2018, I arrived in Vegas shy and confused but ready to learn. I spent the majority of my time attending panels, talks, and workshops. It was fine, but I felt like I would’ve gained the same kind of knowledge from reading a self-help book or watching a TED Talk. Last year, I returned to Rising Stars in 2019 for a dramatically different experience. I learned that there’s more to a conference than just sessions and speeches. Las Vegas was the perfect place for that.
Now, instead of just sitting in each room soaking in information like a sponge, I was actively engaging with each speaker. I asked questions and connected with them on social media. It wasn’t limited to the presenters either. Before each talk, I started up conversations with my neighbors. At each meal, I would sit at tables filled with complete strangers and leave with dozens of new friends.
It’s also important to continue building relationships outside of the conference. Don’t just go back to your hotel room and go to sleep, especially if you’re in a city that’s always awake. Take the time to turn the strangers you’ve met at the conference into friends that you’ll keep for life. Rising Stars taught me that while there’s a lot to be gained from workshops and panels, there’s more to be gained when you’re out ice skating with new friends from Cal Poly Pomona or playing late-night board games in UC Santa Barbara’s hotel room.
2. Use tools and resources to their fullest extent.
LinkedIn AccelerateU
LinkedIn AccelerateU was, well, a LinkedIn sponsored and LinkedIn focused conference. As corporate as the experience was, I definitely learned a lot about maximizing my LinkedIn profile’s potential. I learned to make my profile available to recruiters and I discovered the website’s mentorship program.
Networking isn’t limited to just meeting people in person and exchanging business cards. This upcoming decade, platforms like LinkedIn will be vital to building your career and staying connected with the people you meet. Because of this, it’s crucial to learn to utilize your tools to their fullest extent.
It baffles me that there are people who don’t have a LinkedIn. A lot of people don’t find it necessary because they already have a job or because they have a strong resume. LinkedIn isn’t just for finding jobs. You never know how your network could help you.
For those of you who go to UCSD, you’ll know that I’m the founding president of the ACM chapter there. ACM has been a tremendous success, with hundreds of members and dozens of events. One of our big ambitions, when we were starting ACM, was to develop projects that would tie together the student organization experience and speed up event planning. We decided early on that we wanted an internal development team, but we had no idea where to start.
Well, at LinkedIn AccelerateU, I made a friend named Howard. Howard happened to be part of ACM @ UCLA. Around the time we had decided to start a development team, my LinkedIn feed notified me that Howard had been promoted to the lead of ACM @ UCLA’s development team. I messaged Howard, on LinkedIn of course, and asked about the technologies that UCLA uses and about their workflow. The information he provided was super helpful when we started coding our own software. Without LinkedIn, I would have never met Howard and ACM @ UCSD would have never been inspired to have a development team.
3. Don’t be scared of successful people, learn from them.
IEEE Vision, Innovation, and Challenges Summit
VICS is often described as the “Oscars of Engineering”. It’s an event that celebrates some of the greatest names in technology. This year, at VICS, we got to meet people like Sir Robin Saxby, the founder of ARM, and Harold “Bud” Lawson, the inventor of pointers. For those of you who aren’t engineers, know that these people created a lot of the foundation of computer science.
I learned a lot from all of these tremendously successful people. Hearing talks from some of my biggest inspirations helped me learn what it takes to be as successful as they are. I learned to not shy away from risks, but minimize their consequences instead. I learned that while a lot depends on luck, you’re likely to eventually get lucky so long as you keep chasing after every opportunity.
Conferences bridge the gap between ambitious students and engineering pioneers. Once you enter the room, everyone is on equal footing and everyone is looking to meet new people. Being in the same space made me realize that these great inventors are not much different from me. And so, it doesn’t hurt to start up a casual conversation even if the person in front of you happens to be the inventor of the digital camera (Met him at a different conference this year too!).
A few months after VICS, I had the audacity to email one of my personal heroes, Vint Cerf aka the Father of the Internet. VICS taught me to say, hey, why not? To my surprise, he said yes and we scheduled a one on one meeting. It was one of the best conversations that I’ve ever had and I never would have had the guts to send that email if not for the courage I gained from VICS.
4. Diversify your teams, your network, and your life.
ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing
While VICS was one of the best conferences I had ever been to, it had left a bad taste in my mouth at certain points. VICS is a celebration of people whose accomplishments have revolutionized the world of engineering. Unfortunately, the world of engineering, until recently, used to consist almost entirely of one type of person. I could tell the VICS organizers tried their best to promote diversity — I got to meet and connect with Telle Whitney, co-founder of the Grace Hopper Celebration and AnitaB.org. VICS had invited her to be a speaker and made her an honorary member of IEEE at the awards banquet. However, at the end of her talk, a line of attendees bombarded her with sexist and misogynistic comments. Even more disappointing? The behavior of some of those people before and after the conference. To this date, I’m still disgusted at the things I saw and heard.
While VICS definitely cast doubts in my mind about the amount of acceptance and diversity in engineering, Tapia was the perfect counter to all of that. The Tapia conference is one of the biggest diversity conferences in the world and you could tell the moment you took a step through the door. It was a space filled with people of all ethnicities, all genders, all ages, and all backgrounds. I have never been in a space as diverse as Tapia. I loved every moment of it.
Tapia taught me that diversity is tremendously valuable. The most personally regressive action you can do is to surround yourself with people who think the same way that you do. People from different backgrounds will bring in different sets of knowledge. They’ll come up with ideas that you would never have thought of. As such, diverse teams are always going to be the most successful teams.
Tapia gave me a lot of hope for the direction that the industry is headed. Computing is about to get a whole lot more diverse and you’ll see it in the applications we build. Engineers and scientists are learning about problems faced by different groups of people and coming up with creative solutions to tackle each and every single one of them.
5. Use conferences to discover new communities.
Linaro Connect
Linaro Connect is a biannual conference for 300 of the world’s leading open-source engineers. My friend, David Ding, worked with one of the conference organizers, Robert Wolff, to invite students from UCSD to attend. As a student organization leader, they wanted me to bring students from ACM.
However, at this point, ACM @ UCSD had not launched yet. We hadn’t had our first meeting and we hadn’t hosted a single event. However, what we did have was an active and thriving Discord. For those who do not know what Discord was, it’s an online chat platform. We had over a hundred people in the ACM Discord at this point and so I decided to send out an invitation on our server.
On the day of Linaro Connect, a bunch of students from our Discord showed up. Most of them were incoming first years, excited to start school at UC San Diego. Linaro Connect was a great way to introduce us all to the open-source community. We learned how people collaborated through online technologies and how people were able to make a living from creating open-source software. It was a fascinating excursion into a realm of computing that I wasn’t all that familiar with.
While I learned a lot about the open-source community at Linaro Connect, it was also an unforgettable experience because it was the start of my own community. It was ACM @ UCSD’s first-ever physical meeting. It’s important to realize that conferences aren’t just about the singular community that they’re so often themed around. Rather, at each conference, there are different colleges, different interest groups, and different organizations that are also present. Use the time at each conference to discover all the sub-communities in addition to the conference’s overall community.
6. Nourish each of your relationships.
SWE WE19
Conferences 6, 7, and 8 can be seen as my conference rush week. In the span of just a few days, I was traveling to three different cities and attending three different conferences. I was, of course, concerned with conference burnout. While I may seem like an active and energetic person, I always reset in between events. It’s because of this reason that I decided to approach WE19 differently. I decided to do minimal networking and attend a minimal amount of talks. This was the first conference where I would not hand out a single business card.
You probably think I’m insane for doing this, perhaps wasteful of my opportunity. However, when you go to hundreds of events a year like I do, you end up meeting a lot of people. The problem with meeting so many people is that you aren’t able to develop meaningful relationships with a lot of them. For this reason, I didn’t want to meet new people at WE19, I wanted to spend that time with people I already knew.
One of the people I decided to spend a whole lot of time with was my friend, Kendall. She’s like a little sister to me and we traveled to WE19 together. We got food every day, took cute pictures together, and did a few mock interviews. While I could’ve been out making new friends, my time was just as well spent with one of my best friends, even if I already had the opportunity to see her all the time in San Diego.
At WE19, I also learned that my friend Vicky was attending. Vicky was an intern at Google Bellevue with me this past summer and we hadn’t seen each other for months. We decided this would be a good time to spend with each other. We basically just went around the conference career fair and hoarded as much free swag as possible. Then we walked down the street to eat some chicken and waffles. Then we food coma’d for the next few hours. Conferences shouldn’t always be about learning and growing. Sometimes, they’re a good opportunity to see people who you hadn’t seen in a long time. At WE19, I spent more time eating and sleeping than I did networking. And you know what? It ended up being one of the best conference trips of my life.
7. Don’t be scared to reach out to strangers.
IEEE / ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
When I learned that one of the largest software engineering conferences in the world was taking place in San Diego, I immediately sent out an email to the conference organizers. To my surprise, they responded with an invitation to attend the Automated Software Engineering conference for free.
The conference itself was focused on research. People presented the work that they had done in advancing the area of automated software engineering. There was a wide variety of tracks, including cybersecurity, app development, and artificial intelligence. Much like Linaro Connect, it was a fascinating dive into a realm of computing that I had little experience in.
While I was only supposed to attend ASE for a single day, I actually drove an hour to come again the next day. Why? Because I wanted a meeting with the conference chair.
You see, the conference chair is also the chair of the ACM Special Interest Group in Software Engineering or SIGSOFT for short. I walked all over the conference floor both days to find out where he was. We were absolute strangers, but he agreed to sit down with me and talk. Now, we’re coming up with ideas on how SIGSOFT could work with ACM @ UCSD. If I had never reached out to a stranger, I never would’ve attended ASE in the first place. If I had never reached out to a stranger, I never would’ve had a meeting with the SIGSOFT chair. Turns out, reaching out to someone, regardless of how much you know them, can help you out a lot. It’s like magic — so long as you’re able to help them out too, then new relationships can form from thin air.
8. Remember to be yourself.
oSTEM Annual Conference
I love business cards. I’m about to order my third set of them this upcoming month. I get a lot of weird looks and questions from my peers when I hand them my business card. But I carry them around anyways and my business cards have gotten me to so many places. Back in May, I handed my card to a few people from oSTEM @ UCSD. October comes and I get a text message from a number. oSTEM was inviting me to go to Detroit with them for their Annual Conference. There was no way I could pass this opportunity up.
This was my first ever LGBTQ+ conference. I’ve been to a lot of diversity conferences and I’ve been to Pride a few times but I had never been to a conference centered on the LGBTQ+ community. At oSTEM, I made a new group of friends who I could relate to — members of the LGBTQ+ community who are also passionate about STEM.
I spent my time at the OSTEM National Conference attending as many talks and workshops as I could to further understand my identity. It was a great affirmation as to who I am. I’ve realized that my identity needs to be a lot like my business card. I should embrace it even if I get a whole lot of weird looks and questions.
Remember to be yourself. Embracing what makes you unique will make you far more memorable to each person that you meet.
And those were 8 lessons from 8 conferences! I want to say thank you to all of the support I’ve received that has allowed me to attend all these conferences in the past year. I’m excited to see what conferences 2020 brings and I already have a few trips in mind. To my friends at IEEE UC San Diego, I hope you have a wonderful time at Rising Stars next weekend! To everyone else, I hope this has encouraged you to attend a conference yourself. Go out there and make new friends, learn new skills, and share new experiences!
