TAPIA 2016

ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing

Name

ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing

Organizer

ACM

Location

Austin Renaissance Hotel - Austin, Texas

Date

Sept 14th to Sept 16th, 2016

Role

Tapia Scholar Recipient

About

The goal of the Tapia Conferences is to bring together undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, researchers, and professionals in computing from all backgrounds and ethnicities.It was my second time attending this year and got so much of it. Luckily, I was able to win a scholarship funded by the TAPIA organization and get up to $500 reimbursement. 37.7% of scholarship applicants won a scholarship.My roommate was also a Master’s student and was studying computer science at NC State. She and I attended parts of the conference together and had a lot of fun.Last year, I focused on attending a lot of sessions. This year, I focused on the career fair.I made sure to visit every booth in the career fair and because of this, I got entered into a raffle and won an Amazon Echo.I also got invited by the following companies to interview during the conference or afterwards:

Dropbox
Facebook
Capital One
Northrup Grumman
BNY Mellon
Microsoft
JP Morgan Chase

Other companies just wanted me to visit their booth after reviewing my resume since they weren’t offering interviews at the conference. And other companies invited me to different events during the conference, like Asana & a16z for a breakfast.Although I didn’t follow through on all these interview offers, I did get a better idea of where my career interests lie for the future. I aim to focus more on roles that are design oriented and not just purely development sided. I enjoy creating friendly software experiences and that’s what I want to keep doing right now.Because I attended Dropbox’s event, I was entered into a raffle and won Bose Wireless Headphones.Needless to say, this year was friggin’ amazing.

I’m the one in pink!

https://twitter.com/SonjaOttley/status/776506790724841472

Awards

August 2016 - TAPIA Conference Scholarship Recipient Scholarship includes conference registration, shared hotel with another scholarship recipient and $500 travel award.

Banners

The Tapia Conference has always been a premier venue to acknowledge, to promote and to celebrate diversity in computing.Having attended Tapia twice before in 2015 and 2016, I recognize how truly lucky I was to attend such an amazing conference that is working towards increasing diversity in the computing field.I decided to create these banners in recognition of the conference.The font used is Nimbus Sans Extended.Feel free to download the Sketch file from GitHub and modify it however you like.https://github.com/fvcproductions/sketch/blob/master/tapia-conference.sketch