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We are excited to announce that our Request for Proposals for our 9th Annual Conference is now open!
This is a fantastic opportunity for our LGBTQ+ STEM community and family to have their voices heard and to share their experience and expertise. Programs can vary from sharing technical experience and expertise to LGBTQ+ health and wellness to career and professional development. If your program is selected you will be offered a 50% discounted registration for all presenters per program.
The deadline is May 31, so head on over to https://ostem.org/page/conference-2019-rfp/ for more information and to submit your proposal today!
Graduating from Bowling Green State University with a degree in theatrical design after a finding herself consistently the only black woman, Alexis Moody struggled to secure any interviews or to find a pathway into her chosen career. Despite that disappointing journey, Alexis is now in leadership as a senior software engineer at a DC startup. In this edition of oSTEM’s Rising Stars: Black & Out, Alexis tells how an unexpected encounter led her to a coding bootcamp where she found overwhelming support for women and nonbinary people as well as resources for getting internships and eventual jobs. Finding inclusion as an employee, led Alexis to personally including her queer identity empowering her to come out in recent years. Knowing what it is to be on the outside, Alexis is committed to mentoring and bringing people forward into their own successes. Finally, Alexis is an avid quidditch player and volunteer for the International Quidditch Association, and says that she’s always looking for folks who want to level up their web design skills by volunteering!
CW: Alexis’ story includes some themes of internalized homophobia. If you feel this content may be triggering, you can fast forward from 2:40 - 2:58.
For information on volunteering or to ask questions about getting into Tech, Alexis invites you to get in touch via Twitter.
I am a Ph.D. student in physics on an academic path, so conferences are an important part of my career. These are meetings of various sizes (some as small as 40 people, others as large as 11,000) where I get to learn what is the current work of my peers and those I look up to, where I get to present my own work spreading what results I have made with my research, and where I get to connect and network with other researchers forming future collaborations and even just catching up with academic friends. I have been lucky to attend many conferences during my graduate career, often finding funding opportunities from programs both on and off my campus, because I also have an advisor that has been very supportive of these key scientific events. I also find these events as great places to mentor younger students and promote diversity in the physics community. While there have been many onetime conferences that have been beneficial, there are a few that I tend to go to ever year that they occur: the American Physical Society (APS) March Meeting, the APS Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics, Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics Dynamical Systems Conference, and the oSTEM National Meeting totaling to about 5-6 each year.
At some point during a weeklong conference, I get exhausted.
Get to know Angie a little more through her interview in this Rising Stars blog post.