Expanding Your Horizons – Oct 10 – Trip Report

I took my daughter to this conference on the Sacramento state campus. We signed up online and paid $20 per person attending.
They had a parking structure reserved for the attendees right next to the student union where the conference was held in a large conference room. There was a checkin-area for the kids with 3 lines for name ranges, and another line for kids, one for mentors and a room for the volunteers. The kids received a little backpack filled with schwag and papers, the adults an ATT plastic bag with a notebook. You also got a conference badge in plastic on a string.

They had a lot of volunteers! Each attendee was assigned to a table. Each table had a volunteer. There were other volunteers for handing out food and just standing around and managing the crowds. The table group volunteers took their group through the conference sessions and lunch.

There was a short introduction by one of the organizers who is currently attending college there and then a keynote speech by a professor who is investigating healing various conditions using stem cells. She was talking about her career, how she got to lead the institute and showed short movies of her research and pictures from the new  institute they were building. Attendees asked some questions about stem cells and they were hard to hear because there were no microphones in the room. 

 

The parents had their own tables in the back of the room. We listened to the keynote and then went to one of the lecture rooms upstairs. I attended both lectures that were offered: an introduction on how to prepare for college (“start at birth”) that was very informative and one about gender bias and how to overcome  it when talking to your daughter. At the second lecture there was even a prize: a day-use ticket for a state park. The speakers were an admissions/outreach person and biology professors from the university there.
Lunch was a choice of three different wraps and water and iced tea. Quite simple. I heard no one complain.
Katarina had picked two sessions, one where you were experimenting with artificial blood – identifying blood groups and one where they were shown non-vegetarian plants. She said she liked another conference at the college of San Mateo better that she attended with her school. She said the difference was that they had more sessions.

 

The conference was sponsored by “women of AT&T”. I talked to one of the organizers, Dawn Fritz, also from AT&T who was of course interested in D2BD and even said they might sponsor us. I also talked to the main event organizer and left my card with her. They have done this event three times now and the level of organization is evident. There were few lines and always a  volunteer close by. I did not see anything that not handled perfectly.
At the end of the sessions the students were dropping off their evaluation sheets and received a raffle ticket. I did not see what the prizes were. At the ending session the same student that did the introductions asked students about their experiences.

I think the whole conference was a good experience. It was well organized and informative. I am considering going to the next one in San Francisco November 21.