Grace Hopper Conference 2014

"Note: This is part of a Q&A series where each LinkedIn employee attending this year's Grace Hopper conference sits down to share a bit of their own story as a woman in technology.”

I am in Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing right now, and I'm just blown away by the experience here! This event, hosted by Anita Borg Institute, is to support and inspire the community of women in technology. This year there are more than 8,000 women professionals here to share, learn, and inspire each other.

At LinkedIn's career fair, I met many talented young ladies who are about to start their career; it was overwhelming to see women engineers are making impact in a variety of fields of computing engineering. One would be describing their summer internship building apps for Google Glass, while another is talking about the Natural Language Processing research she is doing to help visually challenged people.

While career fair has amazed me with the diversity, the poster session helped me find in-depth conversation in my familiar field. I had a poster session where I described how LinkedIn builds big data products. It was really great to exchange ideas with other women engineers working on the similar problems in their companies. We shared many lessons learned and found our companies have many similar best practices.

Last, but not least, the career mentoring/coaching sessions are amazing. Mentoring each other, lift each other up, and support each other is a big theme at Grace Hopper. It is also a big theme in LinkedIn's culture. We have Women-at-LinkedIn mentoring ring program that follows the LeanIn principles, focusing on peer mentoring; LinkedIn also encourages employee to seek and build mentoring relationship with senior members of the team; in addition, we just bootstrapped a Women-in-Tech program internally that focuses on nurturing women professionals. I have personally benefited greatly from each of the program. Sometimes it is just that I don't know what I don't know. Having a mentor pointing out a new direction can bring out a new perspective that I never thought of. Mentor's experience, advice, and encouragement are valuable for me to prepare, learn, and walk the walk they have walked. I encourage all of the young women to seek mentoring opportunities early on, through conferences such as Grace Hopper, online support network such as Systers that is also run by the Anita Borg Institute, and face-to-face mentoring relationship with anyone they admire.