#ghc2014

This year was my first time attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing and it was quite the experience. I was excited to travel to Phoenix, AZ to escape Hanover weather for a week, meet 8,000 other women in computer science.

Highlights of the conference included several impressive keynote speakers that opened the conference each day, including Satya Nadella telling 8,000 women not to ask for raises.

<rant>

Satya's remark about women and raises and karma managed to momentarily jerk my attention away from a riveting game of Tiny Bird, so we know it was interesting.

"Good karma" he said, surrounds those who focus on their work, implying that in the end we will have the salaries we deserve. I am 21 and I know that the real world does not work this way. Success comes with an inexplicable amount of luck that we do not all have, and if you're the poster child of successful immigration, hard work, and assimilation, you should know that better than most.

Perhaps I'm biased but women should 150% earn all the $$$$ we deserve. Any deserving person should. My mother immigrated to the USA about twenty years ago and she is the most brilliant woman I know who has, for over a decade at her company, been an invaluable contributor. I have been scolding her since I was a teenager to ask for a raise, but she never has. She's afraid. She's too grateful for the opportunity of employment she already has. Is this right?

</rant>

The rest of the conference was an organized chaotic flow of events and career fair swag trolling.

18 hair ties + 16 tshirts + 12 pens + 8 phone chargers + 6 calculator watches + 3 nail files = a very successful #GHC14 #basic

— Lisa Luo (@luoser) October 11, 2014

I could go into another mini <rant></rant> about the hair ties and nail polish and nail files and pocket mirrors and tight fit v-neck women's cut tshirts that I shamelessly requested a size XXL of, but I do not, sincerely, want to detract from how wonderful of a step Grace Hopper is in realizing the presence of women in computing. Plus I got a handful of phone chargers, battery packs, and one tool kit that I am genuinely excited to use. And as they say, a girl can never have too many hair ties.

The coolest talk I attended was by Heather Pritchett, a Disney graphics wizard who gave a lightening talk on some subsurface scattering work done in Frozen.  Seeing these well known and loved characters in pre-production form makes the whole process of animation so...doable. I'm excited now to spend more time in the digital arts side of my major, to spend more time modeling and animating and bringing the characters in my head to life, too.

My GHC 2014 Experience

The Grace Hopper Celebration…where do I begin? This was the first time I’ve travelled without my family as well as my first time in the USA. It would be a understatement to say that I was excited. I was doing last minute packing with a smile on my face and didn’t sleep before I had to board a coach on Monday night. After over 28 hours of travelling- which included two coach journeys to Heathrow,…