A summary of my experiences attending vGHC in September 2022
By: Maya Lee
I am a current third-year in college, and before this year I had never attended GHC. I have always wanted to attend, but due to covid and my school schedule, I never had the inspiration to go. This year, I finally was able to set aside the time to go 😀
My goal for GHC was really to explore and to see what types of things people are talking about in the tech industry. Of course, the network/applications opportunities were also nice to have 🥳
I started my involvement with GHC by creating my account and signing up for the resume list. I spent an hour or so redoing my resume (and made the big change of switching the locations of my “experience” and “education” sections) before submitting my resume.
I tried to sign up for 1:1s when they opened on Monday, but I logged in too late! The 1:1 signups started at 9 am. I opened the page at 9:05 am, and they were all gone already 😲 Instead, I spent some time looking through the list of companies participating in GHC.
I went to our vGHC social on Tuesday where I met several other people from UCI attending GHC virtually. We had some catered food (Mendocino Farms 😋) and chatted about our pre-GHC experience as well as our plans for the coming week. It was a great way to get to know some friendly faces and have a community among the virtual participants.
Because of the time difference, GHC started at 6am pst. I tuned in starting at 7:30 and listened to some talks while I made myself breakfast.
One interesting talk that I attended today was discussing the far reaching influence of social media, specifically, Facebook. I learned that Facebook is actually pushing the literacy rates of some third-world countries as citizens want to be literate so they can engage online. This, paired with the responsibility and outrage surrounding political misinformation being spread on Facebook, has lead so some concerns from sociologists that this influence may be spreading extremist ideologies to people who do not have the literacy expertise to disregard them.
I was also thinking about Facebook’s rebranding to Meta, and whether the future of Meta may have even more far-reaching influence than Facebook already has.
Getting ready for the first day of classes be like
At the end of the GHC day, I chatted with some other vGHC attendees during our daily check-in. We talked about our first day and what we were looking forward to for the rest of the week. We also shared a meme regarding our thoughts about classes starting the next day.