With less than one month remaining for GHC’16 I can hardly contain my excitement!
But why am I excited? Well there are various things that contribute to it –
1) noob – excitement
The number one reason is that I am attending it for the very first time in my life, and there is this certain unknown factor of what’s going to take place in those three days.
My first encounter with GHC was when I was working in Bangalore and while it was going on I had picked on a conversation between some colleagues that how unique it was and how prestigious was to attend it.
2) Networking is the key baby!
In this age of social media we can connect to people in seconds through Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Whatsapp, IRCs , not to mention good old mails and so many ‘n’ different ways. However when it comes to GHC instead of all that I will be connecting with people in the industry in person and attend sessions presented by the leaders of the technology world.
In GHC’s site it says it is the largest gathering for women in technology – that surely means I get to meet more geeky/technology enthusiast people apart from my Grad school classmates and my colleagues at work.
This thing is also something that I can vouch for, before my own eyes when the registration linked opened on July 13th within 20 minutes it was sold out.
I remember how glad I was that I registered on time and also I had bragged about my promptness to all my colleagues and manager.
So much demand seriously makes me wonder what might be the deal here.
3) Women in technology – are we booming or declining?
It seems there aren’t enough women in technology as there are men and one of the main aim of GHC is bringing together ‘women in technology’. This made me do some of my own research on that and here is what I came across on some statistic –
I would definitely like to gain some insight on why we have so less women in technology and what can be the factors that make them decide that they don’t want a career in technology.
Anyway, I think I am delving into a serious topic here than what this first blog post is intended for and I can probably defer a discussion on this to my future posts.
Let me again bask in the glory of being able to attend GHC’16 (thanks to my company for sponsoring me)
Before I wrap up this post, I would like to share some of the Googling I did for first timers like me in GHC’16. Those who are super excited about it but also at the same time aren’t sure what to expect there .
Some packing tips –
https://ghc.anitab.org/news/announcements/packing-for-ghc/ – (from The GHC official website) – If you are someone like me who wants to take every new piece of cloth they are holding on dearly for conferences and want to walk in their new heels (however uncomfortable it may be) this information can be quite handy.
Some more –
It seems SWAG is going to be one of ‘The Thing’ there!
Also, I came across some information on what to expect in the actual conference from seasonal GHC attendees to noob’ers like me.
Even after reading all these things and googling for more than 3 hours on GHC and first timers in GHC – I am still not sure what to expect there. But yes, they did gave me the confidence that I have at least done some research (the noob confidence I guess)
Hopefully this will be a good place to start your initial research on GHC before you pack your bags and hop on the flight/train/car/spaceship and be on your way to Houston!
Hope to see you all there.
Ciao
DD
