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:
- It was really fun to present about a topic that I love.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.)
- I hope people left with something to think about and some ideas for recruiting and retaining girls in their STEM programs.