A Personal GHC’19 Scholar Experience

During my senior year as an undergraduate, I was fortunate to attend Grace Hopper Celebration as a scholar in 2019 (Thank you, AnitaB.org scholarship reviewers and my lovely recommender 💕) Grace Hopper Celebration is the world largest conference for women and minorities technologists. Here’s a list of personal experiences and reflections that I would like to share (Let me know if they’re useful…)

Open Source Day (OSD)

A few months before the conference, I came across GHC on-site volunteer opportunities. One event that caught my eyes was the “Open Source Day (OSD)”. Open Source Day is a daylong event where the participants collaborate with different organizations to learn about open source while working on social good projects.

I didn’t know what open source development was in the first place, so I decided to give it a try. As an Open Source Mentor, you can pick what organizations you are interested in, and you’ll be mentoring students on the assigned projects. Since I was taking a CodePath online course learning how to create Android apps at that time, so I picked “Systers Mentorship Android App” as my first-choice volunteer project (to practice my Android development skills that I learned from CodePath 😂). I was able to guide students on how to clone the project from GitHub, set up the app on Android Studio, and understand some codes in Kotlin. It was fun to meet some of the mentorship project maintainers explaining how open source software development works. I was not an expert in Android development, but I learned some pretty cool Android Studio’s shortcut keys/tricks (Difference between Control+F and Control+Shift+F , Control+Alt+L — Indent Code, etc.) from other mentors and participants 😆

It led me to continue volunteering with AnitaB.org Open Source (formerly Systers Open Source) until now. I am glad to be one of the mentors for AnitaB.org Open Source during Google Code-in and Google Summer of Code. Aside from mentoring students, helping review issues/pull requests, and test PRs on GitHub, I learn a lot from other mentors such as how to evaluate students’ proposals, give constructive feedback to students, create documentation, and more. If you’re going to attend GHC in the future, don’t forget to check out Open Source Day and pick an organization to volunteer. I’ll first recommend AnitaB.org Open Source 👈

Oh hey 👋 Do you know that AnitaB.org Open Source has a variety of technical/non-technical opportunities open for anyone to contribute/learn? Join us at Zulip! Also, sign up for AnitaB.org Newsletter to get notified about other opportunities!

Career Fair

The queue entering the career fair was insane. It’s like going to Beyonce’s concert. When you get in, each company booth usually has a tablet to let students sign in and drop their resumes. If you want to chat with a recruiter, you’ll need to sign in, and mostly, there’s a line to talk to recruiters. I am amazed by how different companies have their program managers, tech leads, engineers, research scientists, etc. standing in front of their booths and sharing what they do, what kind of roles are available, what kind of technologies they used, etc. I chatted with a financial software developer/ computational mathematician about how they stored their big data on the cloud. She suggested me to learn about cloud technologies like Microsoft Azure and AWS.

You might have read some inspiring blog posts about how people landed a job in the career fair. Some people do, but there are also people who don’t get any job offers or on-spot interviews (like me..)

Interviews

I got selected by four companies to complete their on-site interviews. However, I got rejected by all four of them in the end… I had a fun conversation with a data scientist who interviewed me at GHC. She told me that she keeps herself updated on technologies/news through Twitter and LinkedIn. She also advised me to practice Python and R very well if I want to start a career in data science and machine learning. Anyways, live-coding/ technical interviews scare me. What I can say is I didn’t practice enough (or probably, I work hard in a wrong way 😅)

What I learned

• Plan your conference week carefully. Some people suggested using Excel to keep track of to-go events, but I personally prefer Google Calendar (since it switches the timezone automatically). The GHC app is very useful to track events as well.
• Talked to other scholars/participants. I realized that there are tons of opportunities/programs (A lot of them are eligible for international students too!) I wish I knew them when I was an undergraduate…
• Met students from all over the world and learned how their schools organize events/programs which are pretty helpful for students (e.g. competitive programming course, research opportunities for students of colors, technical interview prep talk, developer clubs, etc.)
• To avoid long queues, remember to go early (especially career fair). Remember to RSVP any company events/parties before the conference.
• Don’t stress out yourself too much on job-searching. Remember to check out amazing events such as Open Source Day, After Party, Tech Exhibition, and others!

Thoughts after GHC

Although I don’t have a clear goal or a post-graduation plan, the diverse experiences shared by people who work in academia and industry really helped me a lot explore different opportunities in the tech world. I can feel the women empowerment when surrounded by a group of confident and successful women & gender minorities. I hope to spread some positive energy to you…

Don’t be discouraged if you fail your interviews, most graduate schools rejected you, employers can’t hire you because they don’t sponsor visas, you can’t even go back to home country for job due to COVID19, a customer that you worked with was rude to you, etc. I’m giving you a magical pineapple power to get through all of them🍍 Be positive and move on. Everything will be fine!

Also, I am happy to be one of the scholarship reviewers for GHC2020 and continue working/learning together with AnitaB.org Open Source. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions/concerns! (I know a couple of people reached out to me on LinkedIn/Twitter asking for mentoring and scholarship advice. It’ll take me some time to get back to you, usually on weekends… Once I read your message, I always set a ‘reply’ reminder on my calendar so that your message is not forgotten😄)