GHC: The After Party
The Grace Hopper Celebration also known as GHC is a conference that is hosted in India and the United States where women within the technology field have historically travelled from all around the world to attend. The namesake of this conference celebration, Grace Hopper, revolutionized the technology world with her invention of file executables and popularized the idea of programming a machine independently which led to the development of COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today.
This year the Grace Hopper Conference/Celebration was like none other, because for the first time in its history it was held virtually online, and surprisingly there was no direct career fair tied to the event at the same time. This had varying degrees of impact on attendees as in a way the Career Fair was a staple action of their mission to empower women in technology and provide such opportunities. Nonetheless, I was most proud of the way women in the industry quickly rallied around each other to create alternatives and create other ways to support each other. To me this had a more powerful effect and meaning than anything, because years ago would such a community have existed at this magnitude to be able to do that, I’m not sure.
The experience itself for me I like to think of it like Gatsby, “I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” Note that parties also inevitably have party fouls and the response by the people who attend or host it are what makes or breaks it. I chose to make it work and embrace it.
Some of my favorite topics and sessions I was able to explore included but was not limited to:
- Cook up a storm of predictive models
- Explore MATLab for the first time and its AR/VR applications
- Learned more about quantum-computing
- Witnessed the birth of chatbots ; )
- Saw awesome studies at the poster presentations
- Contributed to an open source project (Go Trapheus!)
- Tackle other elements of AWS
These fostered my lifelong drive for exploring possibilities by learning. What holds the most value is the solitude I found within our computer science communities and the mentors who explicitly set aside time to provide guidance. I definitely tag teamed my laptops, phone, and joined sessions way ahead of time.
Throughout this I’ve become more confident tackling fears and recognize the highs and the lows as an opportunity to learn as I find my place.
The Grace Hopper Celebration may not have been a party in the same sense as Gatsby, however it’s grand appeal and opportunity was able to invite, encourage, and inspire women from varied technical backgrounds involved in computer science.
When attending conferences in general there can be a tendency to set expectations, do research for what to expect, and then when the time arrives you simply do your best to keep up, enjoy, and as I like to say surthrive (survive and thrive). Have you noticed what happens after? In my opinion the experience itself is valuable, however, how one walks away and reinvest that information shows the most potency of all. If your intention was to network with people of a certain field or area, will you maintain those relations? If your intention was to learn new skills and methodologies will you apply them or set them aside? Or when the celebration is over, do you say your goodbyes and never look back?
One thing I appreciate about the Grace Hopper Celebration is that they do provide a community to make it an ongoing experience, there is still exclusive access to the many session that was available and in this case virtually participating in meetups, speed mentoring sessions, open source coding, provided an opportunity for attendees to connect to have the intimate experience of networking in a valuable way.
There are many things that can be gotten out of a conference or any event that you choose to attend. In this case there is an opportunity to allow it to be ongoing particularly because in the case of the virtual Grace Hopper Celebration many still await the prospect of the career fair.
But what are you waiting for? I used to think that I would apply and find my dream job and bam it would work out immediately. But life and these conferences provide an opportunity for so much more than that and it is a collection of pieces to the puzzle sometimes that help you land the dream job, meet the people who become your long time friend and/or co-worker. I used to revel in immediate input work and output reward, but it is the process that surrounds the results which gives value just as much as the call to action itself.
Some people handle parties in different ways that is what keeps it interesting, but it’s important for each person and whatever their style to actionably do what suits their needs for accomplishing their goal. Not every party may need to provide this much attention or relatability but consider the long term for how you might go about participating in a conference. Attending GHC’s first virtual conference, I feel I gained the most compared to any other conference because I allowed myself to see it’s potential or maybe because in the privacy of my home, I was able to connect with more of my fellow females in technology.