I found that session selection was great this year. One of the Keynote speakers, Dui-Loan Le, is absolutely incredible. Her inspirational role model is Marie Curie and she, in turn, is quite and inspiration role model herself. Her witty and intelligent story of arriving as an English-illeterate immigrant in USA only to graduate as the Valedictorian four years later and eventually earning the title of Senior Fellow at Texas Instrument stands to show how pretty much anything is possible to those who are driven enough and are willing to put in that much extra work and effort.
For those close to graduation and looking to start their career soon GHC is an excellent place to start their job search and to obtain tools needed to prepare for the interviews. I was excited to talk to representatives from Thompson Reuters, Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs, and a number of other great techie companies all in one spot. They were all willing to talk to those interested about the projects and opportunities available but they were also providing on-the-spot feedback on how to improve your resume and increase your network. One of the sessions I've attended, called Beyond Your Technical Skills, was all about presenting your work effectively, and preparing for and passing a technical interview. It's no secret that for highly technical people prolonged continuous conversation not directly related to their immediate work project can be quite a strenuous exercise. The good news is that there really are things you can do to come across as a great candidate that you are and that interviewing is a skill that can be learned. The presenters of the session gave a number of great pointers, including a reference to a book called Programming Interviews Exposed. They also role-played a moc-up technical interview followed by comments and recommendations from other panellists. It was quite enlightening, I must say.
As far as poster presentations go, GHC has probably one of the largest efforts allocated to it. The thing with conferences that cover a remarkably wide range of technical and otherwise topics (such as GHC) is that your presentation is often a high-level hand waving exercise and you rarely get any significant feedback on your work. That is why I was particularly pleasantly surprised to talk to two awesome ladies from Rutgers who work in the area of research very close to mine and we had a great and insightful discussion about it.
All in all it was a great networking event. I do, however, have a couple of bones to pick about the overall experience. First is how sparse the electrical outlets were. In some session rooms they simply did not exist other than those occupied by the presentation equipment. Even in the common areas you would be hard pressed to find one let alone one that is available. Considering that the common areas were the only space with free wi-fi available you would see people sitting on the floor in any corner or by any wall where they have managed to find a said power outlet. This brings me to the other issue I had. If the conference is providing free wi-fi to the attendees, why can't it be password protected and available in guest rooms for those paying the extra to stay at the conference venue hotel? I mean, my options for the time between my chosen sessions were to either sit somewhere on the floor in a common conference area and do my bits of work trying to stay focused in spite of constant commotion and excitement or work in the privacy of my guest room but go down to the basement to check my email every 30 minutes or so. You can probably tell that neither is very conducive to productivity.
All the issues aside, I'm quite certain that given a chance I would attend more Grace Hopper Conferences in the future. Even though it is not a hard-core technical conference where you normally strive to publish your ground-breaking (or nearly ground-breaking) research results, it is an amazing place to meet like-minded people, make new friends, and grow you network.
