This week we did not have a meeting because both our faculty mentor and myself attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, held in Phoenix, AZ this year. It was an amazing experience for me. Thus far in my academic career, the only female professional programmer I had ever met was our faculty mentor. I really loved meeting and networking with so many female technologists and learning about their experiences and passions. I also very much enjoyed the graphics track, the lectures of which I attended the most of any lectures. I met employees at Disney and EA as well as several PhD students doing incredible work in graphics. I attended some of the big data lectures as well because I am doing this research project and I thought it would be relevant, but those lectures were actually more relevant to my capstone project. Finally, I attended several early career track lectures which were inspiring and informational. I also attended a talk by Jennie Lees, which was discussing gender stereotyping in game promotion and recommendation software. She definitely inspired me to look into datasets (including Steam) which could potentially be used in this research project to create a useful app.
My favorite talk was by Bonnie Ross, the studio head of 343 industries which oversees the Halo franchise. Her talk was on telling stories - from the perspective of the developer/studio, the individual player, and the general populous. Most interesting to me was her demos of the rework of Halo 2 - it is stunning to see the game before and after work with motion capture. I also enjoyed her straightforward and unembellished style of speaking and of describing her work and that of her team. She was also very encouraging of women to try to work in the game development industry, despite recent controversies.
Finally, I wanted to touch on the Career Fair. It was by far the best career fair I have ever been to. Not only was there a whole lot of #swag being given out by nearly every company, there were also really cool demos being displayed. Google had one of their automated cars actually on the expo floor, and HBO was conducting free Game of Thrones themed Oculus Rift demos. The image I attached is of me actually in the booth - one of my great passions is virtual reality, and I am even doing my thesis with the Oculus Rift. This was thus a great experience for me - it was actually in 4D in that it included some haptics, like the floor shaking and air being blown on the user from above. It was quite intense and frightening (which is why I loved it so much!).
Attending GHC was an awesome experience. I will DEFINITELY be attending in the future and advocating for all women in computing to attend as well! I would say that it bordered on life changing. You will definitely find me in Houston, TX in October of next year.