Grace Hopper Conference 2008

By: Rosa Enciso

After hard work to get funding during the summer and thanks to the support of the School of EECS, SGA, and Orlando‘s IEEE Section, twelve of the UCF Women in EECS attended the 2008 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Keystone, CO from October 1st to October 4th. Two of the attendees won full scholarships and ten had the opportunity to volunteer as "hoppers" and be part of the conference. Thanks to the great support from UCF and IEEE, UCF was ranked Top 10 University in supporting students to attend the conference.

Workshops focused on how to make the most of networking, how to overcome issues women face in a male dominated field, and the current research on emerging technologies by top women in the area. We also had the opportunity to learn from the journey of amazing women such as Fran Allen, who is the first woman to win the Turing Award and Mary Lou Jepsen, founding CTO of the One Laptop Per Child Organization, and even UCF Alumni Tiffani Williams and Rebecca Parsons. Thanks to this experience, we came back truly inspired and ready to make a difference in our own careers and have an impact in the world!

We had the opportunity to practice what we learned on the networking workshop everyday at the conference and got invaluable advice from many successful women. More importantly, we had the priceless opportunity to get to know each other a little more and learned we have a little more in common than just a degree.

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