Friday, August 8, 2008

What's Grace Hopper?

I get that question a lot from women when I try to "evangelize" the conference. I try to explain. It's odd to me that I only realized a couple years ago that this existed and last year was my first attendance. I had no idea what it was or why I should attend.

I fell in love, of course, with the conference, and have done my best to get more women to sign up and attend. But it's odd to think that so many women, who would clearly benefit by attending, don't know about Grace Hopper.

1 comment:

Kate said...

Hi Anna! I totally agree with you. I find it especially hard to communicate the value of the event to people my age in industry. This year I tried slides and pictures from the event and it seemed to help a lot! I guess that old adage about a picture being worth a thousand words has a lot of truth to it!

I think this year's "10 ways to get your employer to send you to Grace Hopper" (or something along similar lines) on the Grace Hopper website is a great way around this. I also tried to adjust my pitch for whatever group I'm talking to: career advice for graduating students, technical sessions for academics and industrial people, etc. That seemed to help a bit too.