Presenting at my first conference...some reflections

Back before Christmas, I applied to present at the Texas Project Lead the Way Conference. The conference was to be held in Corpus Christi and this year I have really gotten to pursue my newest passion—recruiting and retaining girls in my STEM program (And helping others to do the same.) As I have started my Masters Degree this year, I have really enjoyed learning from my girls and I wanted to share some of my action research.

I had worked on my presentation for about 5 hours, and I had the hubby proofread it and formatted some changes. I was fairly happy with it.

And then it came to my actual presentation.

First, the presenter that was before my session went a teeny bit long. However, she is an energetic presenter. I enjoyed hearing what she had to say AND to her credit, she did help me set up the projector along with the speakers.  I am so thankful for that because I was having some technical difficulties.

Then for some reason my mouse on my laptop became disabled. (It still is!) This was a bit of an issue when I wanted to show my Youtube Video—however a gentleman in the front row was sitting right there and he helped me with the middle secret mouse—you know the button on the keyboard of a laptop?

I refused to be one of those presenters that fumbles around and wastes peoples time while they try to get a video to buffer. But, then I had another video that I really wanted to show, and I could not find a way to embed it. It was this Verizon Commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP3cyRRAfX0, I was able to show it and it really is one of my favorites.

Some thoughts about my presentation:

1. It was really fun to present about a topic that I love.
2. I probably shouldn’t have used a baby picture of my daughter where she wasn’t wearing a top (especially when talking about equality for women). Thank you audience member for pointing that out.
3. I hadn’t prepared for a couple questions. One lady kept asking questions and I kept saying, “I will get to that….or that answer is coming up.” Please give me a break, lady. Another question that was asked was, “Can you legally separate and create boys and girls classes?” Truly, I don’t know if it is illegal. Everyone is doing it. That must make it right?
4. I am so glad I presented. When I graduated from high school many years ago, I would have never gotten up and talked to a room of about 50+ adults. (Adults are scary….kids I can handle.)
5. I hope people left with something to think about and some ideas for recruiting and retaining girls in their STEM programs.