Women in EECS@UCF Grace Hopper Celebration 2007

The 2007 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference (GHC) took place in Orlando, FL, October 17 through October 20. A small group of UCF EECS girls attended the event. Some of us worked our way into the conference, i.e. we spent almost 10 hours stuffing conference bags, and thus totally deserved our registration fee waivers. Others were a little wiser and used their research work to win one of the GHC Student Scholarships.

The conference is co-hosted by Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Its popularity among people from academia and industry is growing every year and consequently, so does the number of sponsors. For these reasons, we as graduate students who are not exposed to industry so often greatly benefited from the talks held by women working for those sponsoring companies, such as Cisco, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, and many others. Moreover, their recruiting booths were spread out in the hotel foyers where students could enquire about various internship and job positions, or just introduce themselves and build up connections. To our surprise, the technical talks were on interesting topics relevant to the research some of us are currently conducting.

In spite of the intriguing technical talks and the opportunities for good connections that were all around us, it felt like we were in great anticipation for these other talks, the ones with titles: “Survival Skills for the Graduate Student”, “Learning by Doing: Using Internships to Discover Where You Belong”, “Latinas Opening Doors to the Future: Advancing Latinas in Computing”, “Storytelling as Role Modeling: Collecting Oral Histories”, “Outstanding Women in Computer Security: A Panel”, “Innovation Strategies: Finding the Big Idea”, “Funding for Tech Women”, which were going to tell as how we, as women, can organize our lives so that we can achieve our goals. Fortunately, we found out that so many women in technology have it all, successful careers in industry or academia (or both) and families at the same time! So now we are more determined to walk the path we have chosen knowing that it doesn’t necessarily lead to the point where we have to choose to be mothers and wives or scientists. We can be both!

Finally, the conference absolutely lived up to its name, because it really was a celebration. All the serious talking was done in such a relaxed and friendly manner, that students never hesitated to approach the panelists or special guests of the ranks of Fran Allen, the first woman to receive a Turing Award, and Alan Eustace, Senior VP of Research and Systems Engineering at Google and a UCF alumnus. These serious events were interleaved with cocktail parties, dancing events, and party nights during which mentors and students demonstrated their dancing skills. Furthermore, the sponsors made sure all of us women felt special by treating us with nice gourmet food, drinks, nice music, and a lot of small gifts and raffles.

Author: Antoniya Petkova

“I've been attending Grace Hopper conferences since 2000 in a variety of roles---industrial recruiter, student, and now as a faculty member.
This year I spent most of my time attending and presenting at WiML
(the Women in Machine Learning workshop) that is co-located with GHC.
I came back with a stack of interesting references for my students, some new research ideas, and had a terrific time socializing with the other women in my community. As a student, especially if you are job-hunting, it's a great way to meet both industrial and academic recruiters;
it's definitely a worthwhile use of your time.”

Dr. Gita Sukthankar
Assistant Professor, EECS

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“A feel-good conference! A great networking opportunity for women who are at the initial stages of their computing studies/career to meet other women achievers and get pointers, support, guidance and encouragement. And with all the scholarships they offer, there really is no reason for you to not attend!”

Shafaq Chaudhry
Computer Science Ph.D. Student

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“Such a motivating and inspiring conference that I am still fueled with energy to continue with my research and help women in CS and engineering.”

Rosa Enciso
Computer Science Ph.D. Student

Grace Hopper Celebration...