How we celebrated diversity in tech at Tapia

At Dropbox, we believe that humility is always important, and a major key to our success — but one thing we’re pretty proud of is how we show up to some of the tech industry’s most exciting conferences each year. It takes an army of Dropbox volunteers to organize events, run our virtual booth, network with employees from other companies, and share their wisdom in panels and fireside chats.

Most recently, our team showed up in full force to the CMD-IT/ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference: a week-long event designed to acknowledge, promote, and celebrate diversity in computing. Here are some highlights from our experiences:

• Over the course of the week, we had over 300 people check-in at our Dropbox virtual booth!
• As part of the week’s roundup of events, our VP of Design Alastair Simpson, gave an insightful tech talk called “From Productivity to Purpose,” which explored the key tenets and benefits of our Virtual First work strategy.

• Dropbox was one of the few companies to provide mentors for both the Student Professional Development Resume Clinic Workshop and Student Professional Development Interview Workshop. All in all, 20 Dropboxers participated to help students in their journeys and prepare them for their next internship or position by providing feedback on resumes and tips on how to be successful during a technical interview. One volunteer, People Project Manager Joe Topasna, said, “It was incredible being able to connect with such talented students over the course of the week — every student brought curiosity and passion into their interactions with me in the virtual conference booth. I was struck by how (Virtual First) culture mattered to students, and I definitely found myself losing track of time with how engaging they were.”
• In the Student Professional Development workshop, Dropboxer Jordan Kessler spoke on the Resume Panel, while Jose Equizabal spoke on the Interview Clinic Panel. One of Jordan’s key tips for attendees was, “Always remember your resume represents you. Use good design, consider your word choice, and adapt the resume to match the job description.”

At the end of the week, we wrapped things up in style with Dropfest: an event for some of our Emerging Talent candidates from both the Tapia conference and Grace Hopper Celebration, a separate conference that celebrates women technologists specifically. 50 attendees jammed along to tunes from a live DJ while they speed-networked, and later on listened to a keynote from Director of Technical Program Management Sheila Wakida, followed by small group conversations to learn more about our Dropbox culture.

While Tapia may be over for now, we’re still supporting diversity at Dropbox through every method we can think of, including our ERGs. You can learn more about them here.