Fourth year student, Anjali Menon, attended the three day Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) representing Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, held at Houston, Texas from October 19-21 2016- a program of the famous Anita Borg Institute. 

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) is the world’s largest gathering of women technologists.

Included below are excerpts from her experience:

“Being a student scholar from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham(Engineering), I was fortunate to get a chance to interact with the fellow scholars on the eve of the start of the event. Since, my area of interest is cyber security, I was excited to attend relevant talks in that arena- ranging from “Security and Privacy in the Internet of Things” to sessions on “The Current State of WebMalware”. Moreover, GHC 2016, gave me an opportunity to interact with some of the eminent professors of the best Universities in the world. This interaction helped me to know about the courses offered and helped me to decide on some of the universities to apply for the MS program me.

Passing through the hallways offered many opportunities to walk and talk with well-known, important professionals. Their projects and their experiences in the tech world really motivated me, and I even shared my project details with them. Many were curious to know more about the activities that happen in our institution’s FOSS at Amrita Club. I also collected a lot of goodies from the career fair and also had the opportunity to be interviewed by Honeywell.

Having contributed to open source before, I was looking forward to attend the Open Source day event. The organization that I selected was OpenStack. It was more of a hackathon where each team had to code for humanity. We had to deploy a web application on the virtual instance, running in the OpenStack cloud. Ours was a team of three and I was the youngest, the other two were working professionals. It was a great day and all the three of us coordinated well and completed the project in time. At the end of the day, each team had to present their application and the work that we have done.

And of course, it wouldn’t be a proper GHC without closing keynotes and a stellar after party! Closing keynotes included: Megan Smith, the CTO of USA; Marc Benioff from Salesforce, and a panel of amazing women from NASA. All in all, the event was a whirlwind of networking, inspiring talks, and swag aplenty. It was a memorable experience for me to be a part of this gathering of wonderful women as a student of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri Campus, and I shall cherish this memory for a long time to come.”