Stemettes partnered with Deutsche Bank to enable five UK students to attend the largest gathering of #womeninTech at the Grace Hopper Celebration 2019.
Vanessa, a second-year student of Mathematics at Imperial College London, is one of our STEMazing winners from our mentorship programme, Student to Stemette. Her aims for attending were the following:
- Inspiration from meeting so many amazing and successful women who are doing so well in STEM
- Since getting to university I have become more and more aware that there is more to STEM than I had first anticipated and that most people even know about so I’m hoping to explore the different possibilities as I am open to looking at what different careers are available
- I also am hoping to work further on my networking skills as it is such an important skill to have and something I really would like to keep working on
- Improve my public speaking skills
To celebrate #AdaLovelaceDay19 say hello to Maths student Vanessa.
? Ask Vanessa anything about Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths.#WomenInSTEM#STSFabFive#ALD19 pic.twitter.com/rufOyVWql5
— Stemettes ® ?★ # + (@Stemettes) October 8, 2019
My confidence in myself and my abilities improved dramatically as a result of attending this trip with the Stemettes not only because of the inspiring sessions I attended, where I learned how to understand and deal with imposter syndrome but also through the conversations I had with the people around me. One such conversation taught me that my abilities are much greater than what I perceive them to be and realising that has helped me to tackle all my projects and learning with so much more confidence.
I had such a big interest in AI before going to GHC but didn’t ever investigate it very much because I found it intimidating. However, in one session I made a pocket-smart fitness tracker using MATLAB where AI and the Internet of Things became so much more accessible to me and I will be doing a lot of investigation into it in the future.
This trip motivated me on so many accounts, I’ve seen so many amazing and successful women and so I’ve been motivated to carry on with my projects and my education and to keep being creative, strong and persistent because there’s no reason I can’t get there too. I’ve been motivated to try new things including projects in data science and learning new programming languages and I’m even more motivated to find internships and eventually a career since I now know just how much is available to me.
I’ve seen that I’m much more confident in the way that I handle situations and in my abilities. Before this, I didn’t think I was anything special but now I know that I’ve got skills, ways of thinking and achievements that are unique to me that I can use to innovate and create in a way that no one else can.
My two favourite sessions were about public speaking and imposter syndrome. Recently, I’ve been doing quite a bit of public speaking and the speaker, from Bloomberg, put a different spin on how I thought of it and equipped me with some new techniques and skills to get even better are giving talks and I’m excited to use them. The other gave a really interesting perspective on imposter syndrome and that your inner imposter can be your friend and not your foe and befriending it can help you to identify your shortcomings to work on them, not to beat yourself up about them.
Good morning Orlando! The #STSFabFive are ready for action at the last day of #GHC19 ?
Yah! Got to say hey to the amazingly friendly Katy Franklin and Jo Spotswood at the @DeutscheBank booth. ?#dbBornToBe#WomenInTech#WomenInSTEM pic.twitter.com/imuNLlNviX
— Stemettes ® ?★ # + (@Stemettes) October 4, 2019
Thanks to Deutsche Bank for making this once-in-a-lifetime experience possible. To keep up-to-date on our upcoming events, head to Eventbrite.
