GHC News: Scholarship Spotlight: Sarah Loos
In the summer of 2007, I participated in a Research Experience for Undergraduates program at Indiana University, Bloomington. My advising professor urged me to enter my research in the Student Research Competition sponsored by ACM. The first round of the competition consisted of judged poster sessions and presentations held at various conferences throughout the academic year. GHC 2008 was one of the conferences hosting the first round of the competition. Having attended several regional Women in Computing conferences and hearing great things about GHC from senior students and faculty, I was excited to submit my research there.
Each entrant presented a research poster during the poster session on the first night of the conference. As a finalist in this poster competition, I was allowed to move on to the next round. This required a presentation the following day for an audience of several judges. At the end of GHC 2008, I was delighted to take home third prize, which qualified me for the grand finals.
In June 2009, I was thrilled to be chosen as a winner of the grand finals and was invited to the AMC Awards Banquet in San Diego. The Banquet is held each year to recognize professionals and academics who have made significant contributions to the field of computing. The most notable awardee that year was Barbara Liskov, who was presented with the Turing award. When I arrived in San Diego, I learned that out of a dozen participating conferences, the three finalists had all started the competition at GHC 2008. This speaks volumes about the quality of technical posters and talks presented at the Grace Hopper Celebration.
Besides the wonderful experience I had participating in the Student Research Competition, Grace Hopper was a great way for me to extend and renew my personal network of technical women – a resource which is invaluable to me both personally and professionally.
Attending the conference as a GHC Scholar meant that I shared a hotel suite with other scholars. In the evenings we helped each other prepare for interviews, talked about grad school applications and gushed over the swag we’d collected. When I started graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University this year, one of the first things I did was call up one of my roommates and fellow scholars from GHC 2008, since I knew she was still an undergrad here. When we met for coffee, I was glad to see a familiar face in a new city.
When attending GHC, I love seeing so many people I know from regional Women in Computing conferences. I met Deanna Kosaraju, Vice President of Programs for the Anita Borg Institute, at the Indiana Women in Computing conference just a few months before GHC 2008. She knew that I was attending GHC as a scholar, and she invited me along with two other student scholars to tell the advisors and trustees what attending the conference had meant to us. I was thrilled to do so, since the previous four days of presentations and discussions had left me energized and excited about working in a technical field, and I wanted to thank them for helping make the Grace Hopper Celebration what it is.
A year later, when I attended GHC 2009, I was invited to be a student member of the Anita Borg Institute advisory board. As a member of this board, I serve as a chair of the Hopper committee, which, among other things, aims to aid regional Women in Computing conferences and encourage more women students to participate in the Grace Hopper Celebration every year.
The people I have met through Grace Hopper Conferences have given me more encouragement and invaluable advice than I could have imagined possible. These experiences have paved the way for countless opportunities, and have helped shape me into the technical woman I am today. Attending GHC is the opportunity of a career and a lifetime. Don’t miss out!
Sarah Loos was a recipient of the 2008 Grace Hopper Conference Scholarship supported by the National Science Foundation.