WeRiseTech Career Talk
If you haven’t heard yet, We Rise Women in Tech Conference hosted by Women Who Code Atlanta is June 23rd & 24th 2017 at The Loudermilk Conference Center.
I will be giving a talk with my best friend Kamilah Kiser. We both graduated from the same school, handle social media channels for WWC ATL. We initally applied to talk at We Rise because we wanted to discuss our road to kick-starting our careers. Since then, Kamilah has successfully landed a position as a UX Design Intern at SITA this past week 👏🏼 I am a Junior Front-End Developer still looking for opportunities.
Our talk will be based on a couple of things. Our title is, Life after Graduation: The Struggle. As you can imagine we’re going to speak of our experiences; the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of finding a job before and after graduation. This talk is not only for college graduates, but all graduates, code newbies, people who were self-taught and now looking for their start in the tech world.
If you didn’t notice already, Kamilah Kiser and I are women of color. We know one or two things about conscious bias but we also know a thing or two about fighting it and how to keep moving forward.
“Finding a job out of college is easy” said no one ever. Finding a job from any point in a career probably gets a little tedious at some point from interviewing, salary negotiation, and finding the best culture that matches you. We’re also not a pair of entitled millennials who think we deserve jobs. We just know we work hard and we will continue to do so and never settle for less.
I believe finding a job should not be done alone and what I mean is having a support group is important. Let’s be honest, in some cases we can begin to doubt ourselves if we haven’t reached that level of confidence, the all too familiar enemy in our head: Imposter Syndrome. If you forget to remind yourself; of who you are, why you began this path, and where you want end up, your support group is there to remind you. Ultimately, you decide your own fate.
We have lots of stories to tell and advice we’d like to give based on our experience. We want hear from you too. If you’re attending the conference, we hope to see you there. If you’re not, we hope you can reconsider because the line-up of speakers are phenomenal from across the world to our own homegrown ATLiens 😉
UPDATE:
As of May 22nd 2017, I have acquired a position at Polar Notion as a
React Native Apprenctice.