Step 73: Reflect on the Grace Hopper Celebration

It’s been two weeks since GHC, and I want to reflect on the experience a little. I have been other smaller conferences – namely, the Wonder Women Tech conference/expo in July – and to be honest, that event left a bad taste in my mouth. There were too many “motivational” stories and not enough dissection of the challenges of recruiting women and minorities. There was a panel of director-level women which I enjoyed, and I got to ask Nicole Stott a question about sharing our passions with others, but those were the best moments.

Still, GHC is the largest and best-known event for a reason, and although it didn’t blow my mind, I also didn’t think it was a waste of time. I share the other faculty’s view that the event is heavily focused on industry, and I would even characterize GHC as a giant career fair with talks on the side. Most of the suggested policies in the talks are also aimed at companies, not schools – a flex work policy to retain women, for example, is a moot point for students who can already work whenever they want. Similarly, seeking out technical opportunities is much easier for students, who get to choose their classes every semester, than for early-career professionals.

Nonetheless, I think it is worthwhile for me to go, if only to have a better idea of what I will bring students to. I did learn a few things from the Redefining Mentorship panel, have some met people who I might keep in contact with. But let me conclude with one experience I didn’t blog, which occurred minutes after arriving at the convention center. I tweeted,

“Most salient feeling after five minutes at #GHC16: not belonging at a women’s celebration. …Except that’s the default for women in tech.”

I should tape that on my wall, because it’s so easy to forget that the lack of belongingness may have any single cause, but as an emergent property of the accepted culture. I’m not sure I know how to fight it, but at least I have a small taste of what it might feel like.

Step 72.3: Help Non-CS Students Start Technical Careers

One of the most promising sessions – which I found myself, but also which several students caught and recommended I attend, is titled Pursuing a Technical Career without a Computer Science Degree. Clearly it was relevant for Occidental College, where students can’t get a CS degree even if they wanted to! Victoria Wobber (People Analyst at Google), Alison Song (People Analyst at Google), Gabriela Alcala Murga (Data Scientist, Facebook), and Manizeh Khan (Data Scientist at Amazon) hosted the session. Although they called themselves a panel, most of the session was interactive, with only one panelist on stage while the others walked around to talk to the audience. The session started with stories from each panelist of how they ended at their current positions, but then turned into pair/group discussions of our individual aspirations for a technical career.

Two things struck me about the introduction of the panelists. First, although they may not have any programming background, most of them were already in a STEM (or STEM-ish) field before switching. Tori has a doctorate in biology, Manizeh has a doctorate in psycholinguistics, Allison majored in 2012, and Gabi majored in math and stats. Second, the focus of the workshop was decidedly on data analyst positions: all four panelists mentioned learning SQL, and at least two of them mentioned R. My original interpretation of “technical career” was about software engineering, so I thought the title was ambiguous in that way. (I wonder if there are technical careers that are neither programming nor data analysis; perhaps lab-technician like positions might qualify?)

I was surprised a second time to find out that the main interactive portion of the session was about concrete steps to learning skills. First, our hosts helped us identify what each person wanted to learn, what resources they had to learn it, and how it might tie into their current or future jobs. The second half was then about setting short term (next week) to intermediate term (next year) goals, and how they might make themselves accountable. It was obvious that the session was a success, as the specific topic and the concrete steps meant most people walked away with an action item.

My main thought, as I was leaving, was how I could apply what I learned to Oxy’s students. When I decided to attend this session, I was hoping for more perspective on what careers exist that mix technical knowledge with other fields, or perhaps stories of transitions, or tips for navigating the job search and interviews. As it stands, the session was targeted more at early career professionals than at current/graduating students, who have a lot more opportunity to learn a technical skill while not juggling other responsibilities. So, although I thought the presenters did a great job leading us through the exercises, culminating in a concrete plan for improvement, I’m not sure it would be as helpful to my students as I want the session to be.

Step 72.2: Blur the Mentor/Mentee Line

The first session I attended at GHC is Shattering the Old Boys’ Club: Redefining Mentorship for Women in Tech, which was a panel discussion and a short presentation by Nisha Dua (founder of Built by Girls), Stasia Efremkina (student at UPenn), Natasha Shah (software engineer at Verizon), and Susan Kelly (Director of Software Development at Verizon).

As with most mentorship panels, the discussion started with the exchange of what qualities the panelists look for in mentors. “Brutal honesty” is the standard answer for this question, and was predictably brought up. There were several other common answers (such as someone who genuinely wants to know the mentee), but one answer surprised me: that the mentor should be a confidant. This is not something I have thought about explicitly before, but makes a lot of sense in an industry context, since mentees may be looking for advice about switching jobs, or (less positively) looking for help on dealing with harassment. Less monumentally, however, it is also obvious in hindsight that for mentors to gain the trust of their mentees, sometimes the things they learn may be confidential or otherwise personal. As a professor, the latter is the more common case, and it’s useful to explicitly think of that information as private.

To be honest, I was more interested in how the focus of the conversation changed towards deconstructing the idea of mentor versus mentee. For one, mentorship still applies no matter how high up you are on the corporate ladder; there are always others who are in a more senior position, or have more experience from which you can learn. So while you may be a mentor to junior employees, you yourself may be mentored by someone else. Speaking personal, this is definitely the case when I mentor students but am still learning to be a faculty member and professor from my colleagues.

But the line is even blurrier than that: it’s not that you might play mentor for one person and mentee with another, but that it’s possible to be both mentor and mentee at the same time with the same person. This first came up in a story about how a cohort of new hires started relating each others’ perceived strengths and weaknesses, and how they can learn from each other even though they all have roughly the same amount of experience. That is, mentorship does not have to be about the differential in positional experience, but could also be about the differential in specific fields or skills. In fact, mentorship could sometimes be as simple as listening to the other personal, being the “rubber duck” as the mentee explain what they are thinking. (Maybe this is a temporary differential in headspace?) This rubber-duck-mentorship means that the amount of experience may not be relevant at all – all you need is one person being willing to pay attention and ask clarifying questions.

It was clear at that point where the panel/presentation was going: we need to break out of the idea that mentorship can only be one-to-one or one-to-many, or that it can only be hierarchical based on experience. The phrase “ecosystem of mentorship” was used near the end, and I think it perfectly captures the ideal of everyone simply having relationships with each other, and freely switching between the mentor and mentee roles depending on what is necessary at the time. To quote the presentation, the focus is not on “getting ahead” but on “getting better”, and we can all help each other with that task.

What struck me is that “getting better” is just another phrase for “learning”, and that is something I have more expertise on. Do we not do group projects, or active learning activities like think-pair-share, exactly so students can learn from each other despite their relatively equal amount of experience? I suspect that education research, especially ways to create informal learning environments, may have a lot to add to mentorship. Oxy does not currently have a STEM mentorship program, but there has been discussions about starting one (whether faculty-led or student-led), and I would love to see this ecosystem idea be incorporated into what we end up creating.

Step 72.1: Set Learning Goals for GHC

I’m heading to the Grace Hopper Celebration today. I would have gone for the full conference (which started today), but teaching and other duties kept me in LA for the morning. Since I’m the only person going, I set some goals for myself, which I thought I would share:

• Meet people virtually. I volunteered for a number of events at GHC, including sharing blog posts (all tagged GHC16, like this one!) and taking notes (which will show up on the wiki) . As a volunteer, I have already interacted with others who are contributing, and will likely pay more attention to other people’s accounts of GHC (which is aggregated on the GHC website).

• Meet people in person. Since I’m blogging about particular sessions, this also makes me go to a lot more sessions than if I was just attending. I have also volunteered as a mentor, which will be opportunities for me to not only meet students, but also other people in academia and industry. My personal goal is to establish ongoing relationships with at least one new person each day, in addition to whatever conversations I will have during GHC.

• Understand GHC through students’ perspective. As an Asian male, I am not the primary audience for GHC. But since I do not have students with me, reading the blogs of people who are the primary audience would help me understand why GHC is valuable. Luckily, I know a student who went before, and also some students just came back from SACNAS (Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science). Some things they suggested I should pay attention to:
  • How GHC (as a conference) fosters an atmosphere where women feel welcomed and not isolated.
  • What recruiters are looking for, especially since Oxy students cannot (yet) major in computer science.
  • Research on the gender gap and what can be done to close it.

There are probably more goals that are not rising to consciousness, but these three are the big ones. I will be writing at least four more blog posts about GHC over this week, so stay tuned!

Step 72.0: Volunteer at GHC

I’ve written before about missing the registration for Grace Hopper, which is why I am going alone instead of with some students. Seizing the opportunity, however, I registered to be a volunteer note-taker and blogger, which will make me go to interesting sessions and meet new people.

This post mostly exists to populate the currently-empty #GHC16 tag, but I will post more under there as GHC gets closer – and of course when I’m actually in Houston!