Hello! I just got back home from my trip to the Grace Hopper Conference (GHC) yesterday and I wanted to share my experience.

GHC is a 3-day conference to celebrate women in tech that is held annually in Orlando, Florida. During the pandemic, it was held virtually and this year, you had the option of buying a virtual ticket or an on-site ticket. I initially bought a virtual ticket because on-site tickets were sold out but I was fortunate that I was able to convert my virtual ticket to an on-site one a few weeks before the conference.

Finding a Job

My main goal at GHC was to land an entry-level software engineering position. Immediately after purchasing my ticket, I submitted my resume to the Resume Database so that companies could view my profile and reach out to me if they had positions that aligned with my background and interests. If you are trying to find a job at GHC, I highly recommend doing this as soon as possible! I had many companies reach out to me prior to the conference because I uploaded my resume to the database. Many companies invited me to join their talent communities, some invited me to attend virtual informational sessions, and some even wanted to set up phone screens! I interviewed with probably 5 different companies and I was fortunate to have 4 offers prior to the conference even starting. This really took a lot of weight on my shoulders and I was able to enjoy the conference without having to worry about landing a job.

The biggest draw of GHC is probably the Expo Hall, where company sponsors set up booths so that you can ask questions about the company and their open roles and you can even schedule interviews. I will be honest – I didn’t really take advantage of this because I had burnt myself out from pre-conference interviews and as I mentioned, I already had a few offers so I just didn’t have it in me to reach out to more companies. 🤣 I instead focused on attending the in-person sessions to glean insights on software engineering from the perspective of women in tech.

Attending Sessions

There are so many interesting sessions at GHC. I had so much trouble figuring out my schedule because in each time slot, I had identified like 3 different session options that I wanted to attend! The sessions cover many topics like software engineering, DE&I, management, belonging, soft skills, product management, graduate school, etc.

Here’s a link to the agenda so you can see for yourself the wide array of sessions that GHC hosts: GHC ’22 agenda.

I ended up attending the following sessions:

• (1202) Opening Plenary
• (1513) Is Graduate School for You?
• (1602) Breonna’s Garden: Mindfulness and the Metaverse
• (2311) The Benefit of Hiring a Career Coach
• (2408) A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Software Careers: See the World in a Software Engineer’s Shoes
• (2515) The DevOps Journey – A Card Game
• (Lightning Talk) New Eng on the Block: a Community for Early Career Engineers
• (2704) Ignite Your Projects with Fire Starter: Go from Writing Code to Automate Cloud Deployments,
• (3105) One Size Does Not Fit All: Carving Out Your Preferred Career Path in Tech
• (3206) #Breakingthecode – Bias, Challenges and Successes of Women in Tech
• (3313) Donuts and Data Engineering

My favorite session was (2515) The DevOps Journey – A Card Game where you got to play a card game that the session hosts created. To start, you pick a company type (startup, mid-size, large tech company, etc.). Each round, you draw from a deck to create your DevOps pipeline and you also draw from a deck to pick different scenarios your company has to handle. You then assess whether your current DevOps pipeline is sufficient to handle the scenarios you drew. If not, you add the scenario to your backlog and try to find DevOps card that could resolve the scenario. It was a lot of fun! One of my team members was an engineering manager at US Bank so it was great to hear her insight. I learned a lot about the practical challenges that a SWE team can face. We even got to keep a copy of the card deck!

The one downside of attending sessions is that the convention center is huge and it spans multiple buildings. I found myself walking back and forth and back and forth to attend the sessions I was interested in. The worst part is when I would walk really far only to discover that a session was full. This happened two times during the conference. The silver lining is that I easily hit my 10,000 steps a day goal!

Conclusion

I really enjoyed the conference. It was great to be surrounded by so many women in tech and I left the conference feeling enthused and energetic about my upcoming SWE role. I appreciated that many companies are making a concerted effort to hire more talented women in tech and I’m grateful that the conference facilitates connections between attendees and companies. I look forward to attending in the future as an experienced professional!