Volunteering at the SWE Conference

This year’s Society of Women Engineers conference was held at the Long Beach Convention Center. I think they rotate the annual conference to different locations. I have never been an active member of this society. To me, this is too board, as it consists of all type of engineers. In the past, I did AICHE (American Institute of Chemical Engineers) instead.

Earlier in the year, Jenn informed me that she might be coming to CA to attend this conference for her company and asked me to check it out with my employer, since BP is one of the sponsors. I never paid much attention to it as I thought it would be unlikely for me to attend without a much more concrete effort to get involved!!!

Then in late August/early September, I got nominated to attend the BP Women Conference held consecutively with this year’s SWE conference in Long Beach. Apparently, the company is trying to foster a more positive environment for female employees within the company, especially after a few top female executives left the company recently searching for other opportunities. I don’t know how I got nominated but my name was on the list. At the time, I wasn’t even sure if I could attend, since my October was going to be a nut case. For me to pull this off, I actually had to rearrange my visit up to Washington and found backup onsite support while I was away on this conference. I figured it would be a great networking opportunities and learned a bit more of what career paths our female executives took to get there.

The company conference was inspiring. I learned that these female executives are just like anyone of us. Not unlike us, they have family issues they must deal with. One of the most memorable messages I got is this, “You can’t have everything under the sun; pick what is most important to you and work toward that. And let go of the guilt!”

Given my own situation, for a long time, I believe in trying my best to get everything under the sun. Slowly and certainly, I have to agree “you can’t have everything under the sun”. This mentality is resulted from a bit of my over confidence, a bit of leftover from a graduate who thought he/she can conquer the world a long while ago. Now I need to focus on what is important to me. Figuring this out is part of journey to understand oneself.

Back to the SWE Conference (after the BP Women Conference), between both of my active projects, I knew I wouldn’t be able to attend much at the SWE conference. At the same time, I wanted to spend some time with Jenn. Of course, another opportunity came along (only when I were at my busiest time!!!)

It looks like BP does recruiting at the SWE Conference. We target the newly graduate or college juniors for intern positions. And they were looking for volunteers to staff the booth at the convention center. Well, since I am local and never understand the recruiting process, I figure it would be great to get an exposure to the business process. My role at the booth was to represent BP in a positive light, telling prospective candidate how great it is to work for BP, generating interests for candidates to apply, and passing out TONS of goodies. I can do this since I am actually very happy at my post and with the company!!! And I got to meet other female employees from the company. This was certainly one stone and definitely more than 2 birds? And Jenn was just a few booth distance down representing her employer. I want to post a picture of Jenn and me at the conference. Of course, the picture is in her camera and I still haven’t gotten a copy yet!