Grace Hopper Conference!

Saturday, October 7, 2017

This past week I’ve been super fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the Grace Hopper Conference 2017 in Orlando, Florida! The EECS Department at UC Berkeley was incredibly gracious to sponsor and provide a scholarship for me and about twenty other female undergraduate students studying computer science to attend this event. It was such a wonderful experience, getting to learn and listen from so many accomplished and empowered women in technology sharing their own personal experiences and journey through the tech industry and meeting so many wonderful fellow female computer science students around the nation. It was overall such an inspiring event filled with lots of positive, contagious energy and girl power. :’)

In the mornings, there were talks and speeches from incredible women such as professor Fei Fei Li at Stanford who directs the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, Melinda Gates (who was about 10 feet away from me when I was getting lunch! She was with another person, but I still regret not saying hi to her and asking for a photo.), and so many other women who had such valuable advice and stories to share with us. Some big takeaways for me were:

  1. Think deeply, be bold, help others.

    2. Deborah Berebichez, the first Mexican woman to graduate with a PhD in physics from Stanford, shared her experiences and these were the 3 points she wanted us to remember.

    When you come into the workforce, if you ever see anything unfair or wrong, you must speak up and make a change. Think critically and make a difference.

  2. You have so much more potential than you realize.

    3. A lot of females drop out of STEM majors in universities because they don’t feel like they fit in with a classroom full of boys. Some speakers told stories of group projects where some boys in their group would neglect the female’s ideas and not listen to what she wanted to say. This along with a lack of female mentors or advisors to confide in, so it makes them feel like they don’t belong.

    Remembering that you have so much more potential than you realize is especially important because for many females, me included, we sell ourselves short a lot of times and often won’t apply to tech jobs/internships simply because we haven’t checked all the boxes and/or it’s a male-dominated industry, making us feel like we’re not qualified for the position. However, it’s so important to have confidence in our abilities and know that we belong in the tech industry if that’s where we want to be.

  3. Don’t conform to what other people think you should do or behave or look; be you and do what you want to do.

    4. Especially as women in technology, we have the power to decide how that looks, whether we want to dress a certain way or dress freely and express ourselves as much as we’d like.

  4. You need to go out and make your dream happen because no one else will do it for you.

    5. So true, and I think Berkeley has taught me this a lot. As we’re stepping into the real world, we really have to always stand up for ourselves and seek out those opportunities into making our dreams come true.

  5. Be a leader to others and inspire more women to become interested in STEM and technology; be a mentor and help another person out.

    6. This point really resonates with me, and after I took the first CS course (CS 61A) at UC Berkeley, I became heavily involved in the teaching community and have really loved this group of people who all want to give back and help other students in succeeding in these lower-division CS courses. I’ve always loved teaching ever since I was a child (my dream job was to become a math teacher!) and getting to teach my small sections of 4-6 students every week and seeing them grow so much as computer scientists and problem solvers through CSM and as a course tutor has been such a rewarding experience.

  6. When you help a million mothers out, you are helping at least 2 million people because every mother is a caretaker to her children.

    7. I can’t believe I never saw it this way, but this is so true and so cool! Mothers do so much for their children and sometimes will sacrifice their job/career to stay home and take care of their children which is so noble.

  7. Diversity is much needed in the tech world; we need people from all walks of the world.

    8. I love this because it’s so true – having diversity in a team is so valuable, because everyone will have their own perspective and view of a problem and how they would approach the problem and coming up with a solution. This makes the team even stronger and will become such a benefit to the product and final result when everyone has different input and ideas coming to the table that can be combined.

  8. Robots and machines are made from programmers and developers behind the screen; they are more human-like than robotic machines. Therefore, there is a lot of power in the hands of the builders and we must use this power wisely to help others. We must also consider the issue of automation if having robots do a certain job is the best idea; will automation take over human jobs?

    9. This really opened my eyes to how big of a power technologists and software engineers have. We really need to consider all consequences of our actions and the decisions we make can influence so many people, so it’s important that we consider morality and our own beliefs when we create these products.

  9. Continuing with the above, we want technology to reflect the best of human values and make products that will help everyone, and not just a select group.

    10. Which also relates with having diversity in technology as having diverse people allows more perspectives and ideas coming together, which will ultimately be able to serve and represent more different groups of people, and ideally everyone.

  10. CS is more about your thought process and how you think while solving a problem rather than simply coding.

    11. Honestly, this is why computer science is so amazing to me, because I am a problem-solver and I want to use my skills to solve more of the world's problems and create great technology. :)

An extremely shocking fact that I didn’t know before attending this conference was that most large tech companies, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc, have less than 20% female software engineers, which is way, way too little! Calling all females who love coding, technology, math, STEM, we need you in the tech field! ♡

Best of luck,

Anita