Alexus McGriff ’18, Karishma Patel ’18, and Professor Sara Sprenkle attended the 2016 Grace Hopper Women in Computing Conference, in Houston, Texas, October 18-22. The primary focus of the Conference was technical and professional development with a highlight being that Alexus was awarded a scholarship to attend. The conference has grown over the years to about 15,000 attendees–this one being the biggest GHC conference yet. This was Prof. Sprenkle’s 9th Hopper Conference and she attended, in part, as Co-Chair of the Faculty Track. Her first one, in Vancouver, had about 600 attendees. With GHC expanding to 15,000–it’s a completely different experience now!
Alexus provided a wonderful observation about the conference: “In short, I feel that it was a great opportunity to be put into contact with a lot of powerful women, and not solely for networking reasons, but to simply be inspired by them. It was such an amazing feeling to be able see a great woman in computing every where I turned for four straight days. It was my first GHC, and I totally plan to go again next year!”
The conference web site is: http://ghc.anitaborg.org/
The Keynote speaker was Latanya Sweeney: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latanya_Sweeney
Grace Hopper’s profile can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
Here are some pictures from GHC 2016:
And here’s a little movie of Karishma and friends having fun at the Google booth!