To those who wonder how I got into GHCI, here are my tries to be the part of the Asia’s largest women conference in Technology and how I finally made it.
Some words are destined to inspire you. Sometimes they are the golden words that inadvertently become true.
“You are the only one that I have hope to become a GHCI scholar”. These words by my dearest friend
and co-founder of Pehia foundation , an NGO aimed at empowering gender minorities which I am part of, couldn’t be truer.
She said this when we conducted an “Opportunity hackathon” to guide students to apply for GHCI and Venkat Panchapakesan memorial scholarship. We both knew that I’m ineligible to apply for GHCI as I’m a 2nd-year student but yet that words always resonated in my ears. As one among the program coordinators, I got to interact with previous scholars and with great admiration I looked at them and enjoyed their stories about their group travel (about 32 girls) to Bengaluru and their luxurious stay at Taj. I hoped at least one among the participants get selected for GHCI.
After that event I picturised myself going with a backpack to Bengaluru and coming back with 3. ( yes!! The GOODIES..). That was in June 2018 and a week before closing dates of GHCI application.
Like most of the sophomores, I never heard of GHCI until I went for a coopathon at IIM, Calicut. During the break, I heard girls discussing how to go about GHCI application which aroused my curiosity. I felt bad that I never knew about it until then. Then I began to read every single piece of information regarding it on the Internet. That was one month before “opportunity hackathon”.
I searched for all the possible methods to attend this mega-conference being a sophomore. But I couldn’t find any.
Then another golden opportunity came my way. By that time GHCI’18 scholars were announced.
rolled out a unique learning program, WIT, a well-structured program to promote women-in-tech. The cherry on the cake is that the top 5 performers would be awarded GHCI pass. I couldn’t ask for more a befitting opportunity. Regardless of the year of study in my college, if I perform well I can be part of that extravaganza, moreover, the probability of getting selected from 20 is really high. But I never made it :|, I couldn’t complete their program as I went to attend pycon’18.At this particular point, I received a call (which sounded like a prank call) who sounded very familiar. Even though this particular person was asking me way different things like what I was doing, what are my future plans and so and so, I immediately recognized her. I had seen her videos on Youtube describing Google Womentechmakers scholarship (in loop ;)). I blatantly asked her, “Are you Anjali Takur?”. Yes, she was!!! I won the Google womentechmakers scholarship.
The following week GHCI scholarship results were out. Some of my acquaintances made it. WIT- cohort winners started their crowdfunding to attend the event. GHCI was a few weeks away. To my surprise, WTM rolled out a separate application for WTM scholars to attend GHCI. Yes, this was it. That was my final chance.
The application process and questions were similar to normal GHCI scholarship form except for the Letter of Recommendation. For any scholarship application, the trick is to answer each question very genuinely from your heart, quoting incidents from your life. Some of the questions included:
- Why do you need this scholarship?
- How would you make the best use of GHCI?
- Why should we award you the scholarship?
- How do you plan to give back to the community?
I made it for a fully funded scholarship from Google to attend GHCI.
Now it was time for the preparations for the event. First thing I did was to take almost 20 printouts of my resume. The career fair is a great place to find internship and placement offers. So going for a career fair without a resume is pointless.
Secondly, I took printouts of my business card which is very important during the networking session.
GHCI has a lot of parallel tracks. So it’s up to you to select your tracks wisely. It’s not just about attending different sessions, it’s a lot more. You have to plan your schedule in such a way that you keep aside sufficient time for networking and connecting with new people. You should really find time to explore and talk to people. You never know what each person has in store for you. People you find there are your kindred souls. Thus explaining passionately about your work to people you find there can really give way for something amazing.
One important thing that I want to spread is that you are not there for collecting goodies. Collecting goodies and swags are fun. But that shouldn’t be your first priority in the career fair. It’s really disheartening to see girls running frantically to collect those.
Make connections. Leverage on those to build your network. GHCI was a learning point both professionally and personally. It was my first solo trip to a place with my mobile phone broke. I really patted my back to have survived in that city for 3 days without internet or mobile for navigation, and being a person who cannot utter a word in Hindi.
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