For the love of Conferences

Question

I don't know about you all, but I really love taking time to go to conference, so I wanted to share some of my favorite conferences here!

Learners will always have a soft spot in my heart because it is SUCH a cool UX conference that one of my grad school professors actually helped to found! I look forward to (virtually) attending every year (and as a bonus, last year, all the virtual "tickets" were free!)

The Grace Hopper Celebration is possibly the best known Women in STEM conference in the world, and I will forever be thankful to them. I was selected as one of the GHC Scholars when I was in grad school, so they paid for me to attend the conference and networking events; the connections I created there were are still are, invaluable. My time there being a mentee actually motivated me to get involved in the mentorship process and now I mentor through the GHC as well! I would HIGHLY recommend that the young women in SWM look into the scholar program and see if you can become a GHC Scholar! Absolutely worth applying for (apparently they also have a remote scholar program, which is new but also might be worth applying to)

I also wanted to share a link I found listing some Women In STEM conferences around the world!

Does anyone else have favorite conferences?

Ben_Hastings · Answer

Thanks Hannah, great suggestion on STEM, watching last night debate here in Ontario, They talked about STEM being the fastest growing education higher education graduates!. it's hard to keep up with the blistering fast pace of technology, great suggestion. I just finished watching GROK 3.0 demo doing complex physics and creating new ideas of merging Tetris & Bejeweled ;) who knew technology could be a little fun at the same time!

(edited)

Aleeya · Answer

Thanks so much Hannah! From a workshop I hosted last week called "Conquering Your Career", I compiled a list of conference tips I think could be valuable to share with everyone when you're planning to attend!
→ Know your purpose before you attend

→ Do preliminary research on companies and attendees

→ Take notes on keynote speakers

→ Prepare your resume, LinkedIn and personal pitch

→ Have a plan after reviewing the schedule of the day (often there is so much going on in a conference
simultaneously so it is good to plan ahead to see what keynotes you want to visit)

→ Find at least 1 common or interesting thing that you can relate to your target company / attendee

→ Print out 3 copies of your current resume to take with you (have your resumes for the "in case"
situation, not the "give out immediately" situation-- it is always good to be prepared with it but you
don't want to just give them out without a proper conversation and build up)

→ Set your LinkedIn QR code as your phone lock screen (this is something I did one conference and it
was so helpful to connect on LinkedIn!)

→ Be engaged and in the moment

→ Keep an open mind to new opportunities and ideas

→ Ensure that your name tag is visible if you have one (this one's actually pretty funny, especially the
lanyard name tags can often get flipped around, so make sure you have it on the right side!)
→ Don’t be discouraged! Keep trying 😊

Industry News

For the love of Conferences

Was this post helpful?