Among the (many) reasons I haven’t been blogging lately, is the conference I attended at the weekend – CCWESTT, which stands for Canadian Coalition of Women in Engineering, Science, Trades and Technology.
It was great – amazing speakers, enlightening talks, and the chance to spend time with some of the other execs from WISE.
I left, exhausted – it had been a long week even prior to the conference – but feeling inspired by and immensely grateful to all the women that paved the way so that I have such an easy time of it by comparison, today.
It is not always that easy, being one of few women, but I cannot imagine how much harder it must have been to be the only woman. People have doubted my abilities, but no-one has ever come out and said to me that I couldn’t code because I was a girl.
Our generation is so fortunate, and we should recognize that.
Starting my internship, the launch of the Awesome Foundation and 6am bootcamp have reduced my blogging, but normal service will resume soon I hope. Apologies!
Graduating is another word for ending. The ending of your time at university, and the commitments associated with. It’s also another word for beginning – the beginning of your next adventure, your next challenge. The next chapter of your life.
On Wednesday, I had to go to Kanata to fill in some paperwork for my next chapter – the internship I’ll be doing from May to August. I ended up having lunch with some people, including the guy leading the project I’ll be working on and we talked about that a little. I’m excited for my next chapter, these new challenges.
Then in the evening, it was the last WISE Inspiring Women event. We had a wonderful speaker, Dr Mona Nemer, who gave an informal, inspiring talk. She talked about balance, and confidence, and underestimating yourself (and gave an amusing example of a time when she’d underestimated herself). She talked to us about not over-planning our lives, but being open to opportunities. I really enjoyed it – she was so warm, and open, and definitely inspirational.
I’d decided that after her talk would be a great time to say goodbye because this would be my last formal event as president, and thank the girls who have worked so hard with me to make this past year a success. I talked briefly about how WISE got started, and what we’d achieved over the last year. And then, I thanked the other girls and gave each of them a small gift (the previous day, I’d been rushing about trying to pick out something different and thoughtful for everyone).
It was funny, because we were all secretly planning things and hiding them. Because after everyone was standing at the front, I was kept there and Rachelle talked about what I’d done and they gave me a card, a giftcard (can’t wait to go buy some new books!) and some flowers, which was really lovely. She said some really nice things about me, and I was so moved. And there was hugging, and tears.
I thought that perhaps I would just fade away and that would be it, no-one would notice how hard I’d worked, or that I was gone. But I was wrong.
I was noticed. I made a difference.
But – I couldn’t have done it on my own. So thank you – first and most of all to the other girls who’ve worked with me this past year, but also to every speaker who has generously donated their time, and to everyone who came to one of our events. Thank you.
On Wednesday, uOttawa WISE had the latest talks in our Inspiring Women series. As has happened every time so far, I think this is the best yet. How do we top it in February? (OK I have a sneak preview of what will be happening in February, and that’s going to be awesome too).
Our speakers were: Dr. Jennifer Decker, Team Leader, Metrology for Nanotechnology, Institute for National Measurement Standards, National Research Council Canada; and Mrs. Stephanie De Silva, Head, Monograph Management Unit, Natural Health Products Directorate, Health Canada.
I didn’t make notes about specifics, so I’m just going to write a little about the different themes it pulls out for me.
First up, I was struck by the similarities in what these two women spoke about, despite the disparity in their career paths and ages. We think we’re unique, that our problems are special in some way, but they’re not. We all have similar things that arise, we just deal with them differently. We all struggle to find balance, but being imbalanced is okay – if we manage our imbalances. I.e. unbalanced weeks are okay, but we can aim for our overall life to be in balance.
Second, I was reminded of Clay Shirky’s “A Rant About Women”, which I blogged about the other day. Both of them had been persistent in getting the job they wanted – without being pushy. If you want to work in the government, calling regularly to say, “so, how’s my application going?” is likely a good idea.
This is something I struggle with, and it was a reality check for me. I released on Monday but I’m not sure some people who I wanted to notice had (it’s hard to pick out one tweet in a stream if you follow a lot of people). And I knew I should message them and say, “hey, thought you’d like to know I released this” but I was prevaricating because maybe they noticed and weren’t that interested.
Seriously, I was holding off letting people know who had already expressed an interest in my work, that I had released something new. OK, I don’t want to be a jerk but this is likely going to far the other way! And isn’t it more arrogant to think they would just notice? People are busy, I’m just one person in a stream of information. Saying, hi and letting them know is not such a big deal! So I pulled myself together and put it out there. I’ll probably do it a couple of people at a time.
(As I write this, I’ve contacted two people. One of them replied within an hour suggesting we connect via phone next week. Seriously – why was I prevaricating?)
Third was asking for help. Stephanie has a young family, and wasn’t ashamed to say that being a working mom was made possible by the help of her friends and family and the support of her husband. This was echoed by Dr. Decker. I think we can be reluctant to ask for help because we think we should know, but none of us is superwoman! The most effective people I know don’t mind asking for help, and do it with regularity. There’s nothing less effective than spending hours struggling with something that someone else could take 5 minutes to set you on the right track with, really, is there?
So Thursday morning I took the thing I’d been struggling to write for nearly a week now and emailed the guy who asked me to do it. Because I’m angsting that I’m on the wrong track. And he can just tell me, and probably make some really helpful suggestions. Of course he was nice about it, and arranged to meet me later the same day.
The fourth, and final aspect, was failure. Some people get seized up by failure, and waste their time berating themselves about it. But if you’re not failing, you’re not pushing yourself. So fail, dust yourself off, and try again.
Yesterday I wrote a post about something that’s really been frustrating me – the fact that WISE may well run out of money in January. I wondered if it was too negative, and I reread it several times and debated about whether to post it… and eventually decided to.
Here’s the thing – I can’t not be frustrated that we’re in that situation. I can’t write about it and not be angry.
In this context, here’s my strengths: I’m passionate, involved, and trying to make change.
Weakness is obvious – I get frustrated when we work so hard at something but get let down by people we need onside, and eventually angry after continually coming up against the hard surface that is University Bureaucracy.
So now I have to focus on what we can do. The semester is over, and we’ve got some great stuff planned for January. I have a plan for the whole finances thing, which I think will work, and someone is dealing with the application thing.
I need to accept that my plan may not work, but I’m going to do my best to make it happen.
Disclaimer: don’t take any advice from me. I’m known for giving terrible advice, particularly when it comes to relationships. Also, don’t let me set you up. It invariably ends in disaster.
WISE has enough money to last through January, I think. Then we’ll have to work something out, or stop.
I’m not down with stopping, I’ll work something out. Watch me.
Here’s my advice: no matter how good the cause, don’t be the driving force in starting (or restarting) a student organization. Particularly one with no stable source of funding. In fact, don’t ever be President of a student organization. Get involved, sure, but pick a clearly defined role and do it well enough that no-one will put anything else on you, but no so well that you give the impression of not having enough to do.
The positive: I get to work with a great group of people, sometimes we get to put on events (like last week) that are truly useful and thought-provoking, and inspire debate. I get to feel like I’m involved in something that will genuinely make a difference, even if a small one, to some of the girls and women at the University.
However being President involves a lot of rubbish things too. It involves the stuff that it says in our constitution, but also taking care of or finding people to take care of the stuff that other people aren’t doing or won’t do. I’ve worked out who I can rely on – and the people who you thought would, don’t always make the cut. Worse is, last week, I got two complaints and another person requesting to be removed from our mailing list, in a way that suggested she thought we’d scraped it off the internet (we don’t do that, obviously, if we have her email address it’s because she gave it to us). The complaints were just… I want to reply saying –
WE KNOW AND WOULD LIKE TO IMPROVE THIS! But I have to tell you something – we have a handful of people and very little resources. We are doing the best we can. As a result of this, my policy is not to listen to complaints from people who don’t offer to help. Sorry.
Then at the weekend I had to break to one of our execs that the application she’d spent so much time on, that we’d submitted ages ago and waited months to hear about? Yeah they totally ignored what we’d discussed prior to submitting it and that their “acceptance” of it was completely meaningless. Good times.
You can probably tell, I’m frustrated. All the more so after reading about the lack of women in tech. Oh there’s a report? Super helpful! I’m so pleased!
OK – sarcasm over. Do we need reports? Don’t they just say things that on some level most of us realize – we need action, and role models, and support networks, and inspiration… all the things that WISE is trying to do. Only we have no money, so that may stop after January. And everyone knows that my job is rubbish, so no-one wants to do it – so what about when I graduate? And I can’t do convert to a PhD like my supervisor and I wanted me to because I pay international tuition, and the university bureaucracy is anyway driving me so insane that I don’t think I want to anymore.
However this post is entitled A Crash Course In Leadership. So here’s what I’m learning:
How to organize and motivate people – need to improve on this.
How to deliver bad news – but sometimes it’s best to keep it to yourself.
The importance of conviction –I am literally out a couple of hundred dollars until our finances are sorted out. Because I believe in what we’re doing, even if I’m not always sure we’ll succeed.
The importance of team work – if it wasn’t for the others, I would have given up by now.
How to delegate, and how important it is that you do.
Will this be helpful later on in my life? Of course. But right now I’m worried I’m failing. Which means I fail the team, which is too awful to think about. We are all doing the best we can, but sometimes that is not enough. Especially when the people who you need to support you, don’t buy in. Another important lesson in leadership, I think: you don’t lead in a vacuum.
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