Things I Learned Today

Last week I was in Philadelphia at We16- that’s the national conference for the Society of Women Engineers. From that conference, I had two big takeaways. Well, I had a lot of takeaways, but two that I’ll list here. 

One was to be your own expert - don’t discount your work because you’re not the world’s expert in something- and even though you may be an engineer, flaunt your expertise in non-engineering things. As I’m just starting off in my new career, that’s important to me. I spend a lot of my day with VERY smart people who know the ins and outs of my workplace. What I bring to the table is that I’m quick on the uptake, I’m always willing to learn and to “yes, and,” and that I’ve built up some bizarre lack of fear of public speaking and of winging it. Incredibly valuable when you have less than 24 hours to prepare a presentation for your group leadership and other work to catch up on in that time. 

The second was to have a “mission statement”. Funny enough that specific wisdom nugget came from a session about stress management. You hear all the time about having goals- the fall back cliche interview question is “where do you see yourself in 5 years,” right? But to have a mission is different. My idea is, if I come home at the end of the day and can honestly say I’ve done this, it’s a successful day and I’m moving forward. So I came up with a mission:

Here at things-i-learn enterprises our primary goal is to ensure the blogger learns new things, expanding her horizons, and to consistently produce meaningful, impactful work in the blogger’s professional life.”

OK so I’m no PR guy. This has not gone through rigorous testing with senior management of my one-woman show. The point is, I want to keep learning. Every day. And I want to do something that matters- I can’t stand the idea that I may become some code monkey in a little box somewhere. Some people can thrive there, and your mission statement may reflect that! I cannot. 

So I’m creating this blog to combine those two ideas. Each day I want to learn something new- it may be something technical, it may be something social, it may be something about my company, it may be something about the place I’m living. As often as I can- it’ll likely be irregular and sporadic, I’ll make a post sharing something I think is useful. It may be something I just learned, or it may be something I’ve been sitting on for a while that has helped me or the people in my life.