Amazing Grace

Tuesday East won its first water polo game. Alas, I was unable to play because I gave blood that evening, but it was fun to watch, and I got some photos with my roommate's camera that I'll attempt to post soon. I'm off at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference. In recent years, Mudd's been sponsoring a number of female students (especially freshmen) to go to the conference, and I'd like to major in CS, so I signed up.

It's quite exciting, actually, in so many big and little ways. First off, the conference in itself is a massive amount of technological women in one place. That does not happen often enough, in my opinion. Second, there are cool talks on robots and teaching and things. Third, there's lots of swag (I got two USB drives and a hub, a lot of pens, a coloring book, a stress ball, sunglasses…). Fourth, we're at a SHINY RESORT where I'm sleeping in a large comfy bed with a large bathroom with ONE DOOR and a BATH. Fifth, there are all these people with shared interests and connections in all sorts of interesting ways. I went to a super-cool lunch today with LGBT women in computing, and we had fun chatting about what it's like to be out in college or in the workplace. Sixth, our nametags have cool ribbons on the bottom (mine says UNDERGRAD and BRONZE UNDERWRITER and LGBT). It's been a little weird, as this is the first conference where I've actually been a meaningful, effectively adult participant. I've always gone with a parent and just followed said parent around, grabbing free pens and things as they talked to people. Here, I'm scouting around for internships, and MY GOODNESS there are a lot of them. Seriously, if any girls reading this are interested in finding connections in the CS world, this is a good place to go. Plus there's dancing in the evening.

It was super exciting yesterday - I actually finished all of my homework in time to get on the bus to go. The profs were super supportive of all the frosh going to Grace Hopper (and there are a lot of us - the entire female population of my humanities section went) and changed some deadlines and things, so that was easier to accomplish than usual, but I'm still rather surprised that I managed all that, especially as my roommate and I hosted a prospective student on Monday and Tuesday and thus were quite distracted for the day.

Enough of my rambling. I'll post sometime next week, as I think I'll be a busy be until then what with midterms and such. Ask me random questions about things in the meantime, though. Pretty please. I like answering questions.