NWrWIC. Northwest Regional Women in Computing Conference. October 19th. What an amazing day! We, on the planning committee, were exhausted but ecstatic after the event. We could not have hoped for a better day. Our photographer, the amazing Hal Harrison, of Rose City Photography, captured 300+ images during the conference. We look back at those images, and see that the entire day was full of smiles and laughter and focus and interest. Students, as well as professionals, were engaged through the entire day.
Those of you who attended know that Rajani Ramanathan of Salesforce, a veteran technologist, started us off speaking about women and technology. Afterwards, attendees became so involved in our post keynote activity, The Hunt, that we had a hard time convincing them to go take a break before the next talk.
Following The Hunt, Alex Zafiroglu and Jennifer Healey, cultural anthropologist and engineer talked about how they work together. Not only is their research interesting and apropos to the future of technology, but they were FUNNY. Oh, my goodness, had I not know that I were at a technical conference I would have thought we were at a comedy club. Alex and Jen have such differing understanding of the world and how things work, but they were comfortable enough with each other that they could easily laugh about their sometimes difficult communication.
The lunch panel had insightful information about current and future technology jobs and what employers are looking for. We were excited to have an amazing panel of professional hiring folks from Tripwire, Thomson Reuters, Adobe, and Salesforce. Following lunch was the fascinating research from the Ubiquitous Computing Lab at the University of Washington, presented by Lilian de Greef and Sidhant Gupta, covering many of the labs’ current research topics and devices. Then Karl Koscher did the finale technical talk with his research on how he and his fellow researchers were able to hack into car systems and prove to car manufacturers that they need to beef up car security.
Later in the afternoon we had mock interviews and resume reviews for which we had overwhelming demand. We ended with the career fair with still a high level of enthusiasm and smiles and focus. I spoke with most of the schools and companies who had tables at the career fair – they were excited to be there and are looking forward to coming back in the spring.
Take a look for yourself to see how engaged the attendees were throughout the day: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/7i40z1ifk17p6mt/qbKC71pxaf
– Pamela
NWrWIC 