KatysBlog

September 28, 2012 · 7:18 pm

Last TechWomen Day at Huawei

Today was the last day at Huawei in Santa Clara for the three TechWomen mentees during their visit to the Silicon Valley. There are still some San Francisco Bay Area events before they travel to the the Grace Hopper Celebration and then the US State Department in Washington DC next week. The Huawei team held a lunch and gave each of our emerging leaders a certificate signed by Futurewei President, Guolin Wang, and by the TechWoman’s mentor or mentors. I was also treated to a surprise birthday party this morning and Huawei held its annual Moon Cake and Chinese harvest festival party this afternoon. A busy day!

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Filed under Hopper - Anita Borg Institute, Mentoring & Other Business, News & Reviews

Tagged as China, Geeks, Huawei, Mentoring, Middle East, San Francisco, technical women, TechWomen

September 27, 2012 · 3:06 pm

Huawei TechWomen Learning

In both 2011 and 2012, Huawei hosted three TechWomen mentees during their visit to the Silicon Valley. During these short and busy weeks, I invited all the Huawei TechWomen team (3 mentees, 6 Professional and Cultural mentors, 2 backup-mentors, Human Resources support, etc.) to a weekly meeting to check in with each other, discuss key questions, and practice public speaking. The questions are some that we all expect to be asked when we visit the Grace Hopper Celebration and then the US State Department in Washington DC next week: Why did you join TechWomen? What did you learn? What do you plan to do with what you have learned from TechWomen?

We had our last team meeting yesterday here in Santa Clara. It was moving to hear how much everyone had benefited from TechWomen already. This is a remarkable group of super-smart geeks – I am honored to know them. Some of what the eleven present said:

I will share what I have learned with my students
I will tell other technical women in my home country about the TechWomen program, and encourage them to apply
I will set up seminars and technical talks so that we can exchange experience and technical knowledge, so that we can make better choices in the future
I will tell my manager and my home organization’s leadership what I learned
I will design and implement a mentoring program to increase learning and communication
I will keep my connection with members of the TechWomen community with virtual conferences
I will change my life, continuing to work hard but also allowing myself time to think how to change the future
I will work with my staff to prepare them better for promotion
I will spend more time on my startup company, to benefit the education of children
I will encourage other technical women to change the world, using examples I have seen in the Silicon Valley
I will seek more experiences in which I can learn from other technical people outside of my country
I will tell new hires about the importance of mentoring in their professional lives
I will work with entrepreneurs to create opportunities for good jobs for educated people in poor areas of the world
I will provide connections and support for TechWomen emerging leaders when they go home
I will make space in my life to give back to my community
I will seek opportunities to make corporate social responsibility a focus for the new generation of companies
I will continue connecting with extraordinary technical women and spread the message of TechWomen
I will continue the momentum and follow my passion

3 Comments

Filed under Hopper - Anita Borg Institute, Mentoring & Other Business, News & Reviews

Tagged as Geeks, Huawei, Mentoring, teaching, technical women, TechWomen

September 26, 2012 · 2:19 pm

TechWomen: Last Week in Silicon Valley

The 42 TechWomen Mentees from eight countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA region) have been in California’s Silicon Valley for almost three weeks. Next week, we move on to the Grace Hopper Celebration (Baltimore MD) and to visit the US State Department in Washington DC.

This week, my Mentee and I visited a grade school computer club (thanks to the invitation from Suzanne Andrews of ABI). Last night, we went to a big party at Twitter in San Francisco. Sending tweets directly from Twitter’s headquarters was fun. We also continue to work diligently on her project. This has been a special and productive time for mutual learning.

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Filed under Hopper - Anita Borg Institute, Mentoring & Other Business, News & Reviews

Tagged as Geeks, Mentoring, Middle East, Silicon Valley, technical women, TechWomen

September 23, 2012 · 10:51 pm

Shakespeare Reading Group

The community at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church has just started a Shakespeare Reading group, with me as the official Shakespeare Mentor. Tonight, 13 of us met to read Midsummer Night’s Dream together. Melita Thorpe hosted the event and organized the pot luck supper. As the Shakespeare Mentor, I recommended MSND movies to watch in advance, sent out an email with background on the play and recommendations for how to read Shakespeare, brought texts to read from, and distributed roles for the evening. My favorite MSND films are those of 1935, 1968, 1996, and 1999 (see details on the Midsummer Night’s Dream wikipedia page section on films).

My advice on reading Shakespeare socially:

Shakespeare wrote play scripts – not literature – reading a Shakespeare play is entertainment and you should enjoy yourself!
Trust the punctuation – pause not at the end of a line or at a rhyme but only at the period ending the sentence.
Read as quickly as you can using a normal tone – no special accent is needed for most roles.
Keep going – do not pause between speeches or scenes – the characters should sound like they are responding to each other.
If there is a word you do not know, give it your best guess and go on (or you can ask for advice!).
The gender of the role and of the reader do not have to match – remember that Shakespeare had an all-male cast.
If the lines in your script do not match the lines in someone else’s, don’t worry about it – Shakespearean scholars don’t always agree on the text – just keep reading.

Everyone enjoyed the evening – several of the readers made us all laugh. I am looking forward to future meetings!

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Filed under Church, Home & Family, News & Reviews

Tagged as Episcopal church, Mentoring, Shakespeare, St. Andrew's Episcopal Church

September 22, 2012 · 11:24 pm

TechWomen Tours

Yesterday was a very full day for the 42 TechWomen visiting California from the Middle East and North Africa. Audrey Van Belleghem (NetApp Director, Strategic Programs) invited a group of us to tour the NetApp Sunnyvale campus – seeing the data center and sharing lunch. Then, a group of TechWomen went to visit the Stanford University campus, while others started driving south to visit Disneyland, Hollywood, and Universal Studios for the weekend.

Last night, two dozen mentors, mentees, and Anita Borg Institute program staff gathered at the Muslim Community Association in Santa Clara. I worked with the MCA Outreach group to set up this event. MCA generously hosted the dinner and welcomed the TechWomen into their community. Three of the TechWomen (two mentors and a mentee) had gone to the same Engineering school in Alexandria, Egypt, and had fun catching up with each other over dinner.

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Filed under Hopper - Anita Borg Institute, Mentoring & Other Business, News & Reviews

Tagged as Geeks, Mentoring, Middle East, technical women, TechWomen

September 20, 2012 · 10:20 pm

New Porch

This summer, we have been fixing up our home – doing small construction and repairs, including: refinishing the front door, filling in missing baseboards, refinishing the floor in John’s office, eliminating some dry rot and fixing a floor that shifted out of level in John’s model train room and workshop, adding a side fence and creating a pottery studio for Paul. Our next project is to add a side porch to the house. The contractors poured the concrete foundation yesterday. Months ago, we bought hundreds of old ceramic roof tiles from a neighbor – which match those already on our 1930 Willow Glen house roof. The “new” tiles will go on the porch roof so that it will look like a natural part of the house.

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Filed under Home & Family, News & Reviews

Tagged as garden, House Work, John, Paul, San Jose, Willow Glen

September 20, 2012 · 12:15 am

TechWomen at Work and Play

Our second week of the TechWomen mentoring program here in the Silicon Valley has been one of both work and play. My mentee and I are deep in discussions about her project during the day. Tonight, a group of us went with our Huawei co-workers to a San Jose Earthquakes soccer game.