What is your brand?

One of my favourite talks at the Grace Hopper Conference was about how to develop your brand. What is a brand? It's what people perceive you.

Unfortunately, I didn't exactly take notes during the talk and so here's what I remember and I'll add a little of my own perspective to it. With how everything is going online these days, one of the ways to develop your brand is your online presence. For example, many techies these days have an online personal website or blog that describes what they do or have done and their interests. Besides the online presence, a lot of your brand has to do with how you interact with people and that's usually in your community, your work place or school.

Many say that the internet is forever. It means anything that is uploaded can stay online for a very long time. One important piece of advice is to never upload anything that is offensive or gives you a bad image. Nowadays, I see that many people use Linkedin as their professional networking place where Facebook (or Tagged, Windows Live, Google+) is for personal online networking site. Because Facebook is intended for personal use, I see that people are more likely to upload more inappropriate pictures or comments than anywhere else. Granted, Facebook has permissions control if you use them properly but many do not recognize that the content is open for public. One important fact is that the user's facebook friends can also include employers, current or future colleagues. This means LinkedIn and Facebook don't have a very obvious boundary between professional and personal usage. As a result, it is important to be sensitive in regards of the content posted on all networking websites.

One of the questions asked during the talk at Grace Hopper was how do you separate your brand from the professional and personal world. The answer is you can't. Whatever comes up with the search of your name on the internet is part of your brand. One of the advice there was to google your name every once in a while to see what content comes up. Also, there are many applications these days that ask for your permission to access certain information from your Facebook account. Be careful with what permission you have given. Who knows what these applications do with your personal information but this is a big separate topic that I may save for another day to blog about.

On a side note, the UBC CS department is holding a competition on e-portfolios. I have entered in this and I look forward to remake my current website! Stay tune!

Short Summary of the Grace Hopper Conference

This is going to be a short summary post because I am exhausted from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference and I wanted to write this post now while I am still fresh.

For those who hasn't been following me, I went to the Grace Hopper conference this past week in Portland, Oregon. Without any funding from UBC, I did a road trip with 3 fellow UBC grad students and shared a room with them to make the cost of the trip lower. We managed to keep the cost to $120 from transportation and hotel which was pretty good but lost 12 hours to driving. Not too bad!

I didn't know what to expect in what to get out of this conference other than I had lots of people tell me that it's great. I think I was a little disappointed at the conference but that was only because some fellow students made the conference as if it's the greatest week of my life. The bar was set a little too high but I actually really enjoyed the overall experience of the conference but not at a specific reason. So, what was so great about it? There were 2908 participants and I have never seen that many technical women before! The networking aspect was great. I got to meet so many people this week and it was amazing getting to hear their stories. I was a little shocked at the fact that only about 1/3 of the participants were only students while much less of those were undergraduate students. I thought it was great to meet people in the industry and hear about their struggles in the workforce.

The food was actually good for the event. Since they provided the food, I ended up more chances to mingle with other people. Also, there were very few UBC students (6?) so it meant I met a lot more people. The career fair was also great. There were a lot of companies there so I got a chance to learn more about their companies and internship programs since I'm actively seeking internships for next summer. Some of the talks were very technical, or practical skills to use or inspiration. I felt that sitting through that many talks was useful since I'm not very good at presenting. A lot of the presenters are actually students so they weren't always excellent but I got to see some amazing speakers. One thing I do have to critique is that while the talks do tell you what the topic is about, they don't necessary say whether they are for beginners or for a more advanced audience. For most of the PhD forum talks, they consist of PhD students talking about their researches but I was not familiar with their research topics at all. And after 5 minutes into their talks, I was clueless about what they were talking about. At the same time, I sat through some presentations where the talk was too simple and I got nothing out of it. Since the conference is so big, I guess it's very hard for them to make it fit for everyone but nonetheless I learned a lot through the many talks.

Some of the talks that I enjoyed were the CRA-W undergrad track, HTML5, technical speaking, how to maintain your confidence, and tips on negotiation. (I'll try to talk more about these talks later) Sheryl Sandberg's talk was inspiring. I wish I have the skills to have as big of a stage presence as she does. One of the best advice that I got this week about how to survive this conference was to take breaks and not attend certain talks if it meant you would get more out of the next talk. This was my first time at GHC and I have to say I was very overwhelmed and exhausted. The days there were like 8am to 8pm. I didn't have enough time to do everything. Luckily, my travel group decided to stay at a place really close to the convention center so I was able to go back to my hotel for a brief break and get away from everyone when I felt tired.

On the last day, I was at the Open Source Day working on the Google Crisis Person Finder. I actually quite like that project because it's written in Python using Django framework and Google App Engine and it's small and simpler than other open source projects that I know. I didn't get as much as I could out of it because I was absolutely exhausted after 3 straight days of the conference and frying my brain for the code sprint was a little too much. Nonetheless, I was able to fix a bug with a fellow googler and submitted it! I hope on this project for more.

Overall, I was very happy with this conference and totally glad I made the trip. The conference was very well planned and every minute was worth my time. I missed the tournament with my UBC ultimate team but I heard they won the Sundodgers tourney this year again! (Yay 3-peat). I hope that I'll be able to go next year to Baltimore for GHC 2012!

Women in Computer Science at UBC

With time flying, I can't believe the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is next week! I am so excited! Now that I'm an upper level undergraduate student, I always wanted to go to at least one conference and I'll be satisfying that personal goal next week! In celebration of the conference, let me talk more aout my experience as a Computer Science at UBC.

On one of my first ever visits at UBC as an official UBC student, someone asked me what was my major and I answered that I was in Computer Science. Her response was "Woah! Crazy science!". That type of response actually followed me throughout the rest of my undergraduate and continues to do so. More often, this type of response is only directed to women in Computer Science. The responses I get are usually people telling me this degree is too hard or it's not meant for women. I never understood that. If the degree is to hard, it would mean there would be very few people in that degree or students would consistently fail. I didn't see either of that. And of course, most people don't even know what this field is about.

I remember being in CPSC 111 and it was really my first exposure to Computer Science. I don't think I was ever intimidated by other students that were more knowledgable in CS or the lack of women in the course. Actually, I think there were actually at least 30% women in that course so it wasn't very obvious that I was a minority. The things that I did notice was that there were some very passionate CS students that knew a lot since they have been programming for a while and I don't think I often see this in other majors. Second, the department of CS is actually very supportive of their students and very willing to help students to make sure they succeed. However, there were always one or two students that knew a lot and would like to ask a lot of irrelevant questions in class to show off their knowledge.

I sometimes feel that women complaining that they're intimidated by other male students can be exaggerated. While there are more male students that are very passionate in CS, there are also many male students that are the typical students that don't do anything outside of school and are 'just getting their degree'. I've also seen quite a few female students that do a lot of work outside of school and in the department. I sometimes feel this intimidation is due to a lack of confidence of not believing that they know the material well. I used to be similar to that but I was curious to learn and I wasn't afraid of being wronged. If I was wrong, it means I get an opportunity to learn more, how great! I also believed that if I was able to show who I am or what I'm capable of, no one can possibly deny me an opportunity due to the fact that I'm a female. This in turn only led me to believe to work harder.

Another reason I could think of why women are intimidated is because women are conditioned in our culture to take a back sit or certain ways. For example, when I was a kid, I was told to play toys in a more polite, non-aggressive, feminine way because I was crashing my toy cars into each other quite hard. Also, I was told that women should not be playing sports because it's too unfeminine and are for boys. These are some scenarios that I saw women being discouraged from certain activities and I'm not surprised to see women less likely to speak up in situations because women were raised (depending on culture) to be polite and 'feminine' (whatever that means).

Anyway, this is really just my two cents. I'm quite curious to hear more at Grace Hopper Conference!