The trip overall had been really good up until this point. The Giants beat the Seahawks. I got to see my nephews. I got to reconnect with Oswego after not being there for over 15 years and the weather was perfect. I met some cool students and have re-established some contacts with some professors and staff on campus. Actually before I talk about Tuesday and presenting at the Women's Conference, I should talk about the previous night – dinner at the home of Deborah Stanley, the President of Oswego State.
The President lives in a house called Shady Shore and it always seemed like it was the cool place that was right on the lake that I was paying for, yet never benefitted from. I learned later that was more of a function of the personality of the person living there. I was invited to dinner there with 2 other speakers for the Women's Conference, along with some other folks who are associated with fundraising and the Alumni Office. I show up and Deborah (she is so not a formal person) already has a glass of red wine in her hand. OK, cool.
All I can say is that I was just bowled over about how gracious of a host she was. She explained the history of the house as well as some of the furniture, which was really fun to hear about. She wanted to know what I talked to the students about and what I picked up on from the students. Really engaging – actually both her and her husband, Michael. Deborah was telling us that they have buffet dinners with students on a regular basis and people are just sitting on the floor hanging out and chatting. It's a very comfortable layout given the style of the house as well as all of the antiques inside. We discussed the current situation with the meltdown and how do you incorporate ethics into students' everyday thinking. It was an interesting dialogue.
Anyway back to the Women's Conference. I was pretty nervous about speaking partly because all of my experience is pretty much big city and corporate. The demographic of the audience was mostly women, some students, but mostly women in the workforce of varying ages, who all lived in Central Upstate New York. So I was concerned that my experiences wouldn't resonate with them.
As I worked on my preparing my thoughts, I thought of the overall theme of the conference, "Change, Growth and Vision". So I decided to talk about different phases of my career at a high level and have each slide have an area where I laid out where I made a mistake. I figured if I was transparent about my mistakes in my career, it may make me more genuine to the audience (I was also younger than probably 75% of the audience by about 8-10 years). When you're talking about your mistakes, it makes you take yourself less seriously, so I was throwing in some of the funnier things that happened in my career.
I tried to get a sense of the demographic in terms of people contemplating career changes, business owners, students, etc. That helped a little in terms of my talking points. I was trying to make eye contact with as many people as possible as it was a big room and I'm a vertically challenged person who was not on a podium. I felt as though my message was resonating but when I was done, I was pretty beat. The audience asked some great questions about what I talked about, so I was really pleased about that because clearly they were paying attention.
But my work was not done. I had mentioned in the 'Students' blog post about a woman named Rachel, the non-traditional student who served 4 years in the military before coming to school. When I saw that she came to the presentation, I gave her a heads-up that I may put her on the spot but to trust me. At the end of the presentation, I asked everyone to raise their hands if they would value military experience in a prospective employee if your job opening had absolutely had nothing to do with the military. Everyone's hands went up. I then told Rachel to stand up, introduced her to the crowd (everyone clapped), and basically informed Rachel that she now had a room full of people who probably could help her if she asked. She was stunned and a little embarrassed, but she saw what I was trying to do and that was to get her to believe in herself. I guess she never thought I would take an interest like that, but wherever she got the idea that her military background, combined with her maturity around going back to school with a young family, would work against her – I don't know. She actually sent me an e-mail later thanking me for helping her out and included some other nice thoughts. It is a good day when you can make an impact like that.
Finally my day ended with me rushing to the airport to catch a flight to NYC to spend the night before getting the early morning flight back to Seattle. Facebook has reconnected me with lots of people from my high school and college days that I haven't talked to in years. One of those people was my friend, Tisa, whom I met at Oswego where we were both in the same dorm for freshman year. We also did crew together (she rowed, I cox'ed…. Not very well) and ended up studying abroad in London the same semester but with different programs. I hadn't seen her in about 15 years. So we met at Volare, where the boys took great care of us and Tisa got lots of leftovers because of the insane portions. It was so good catching up with her. She looks great and is doing some great non-profit work with adults trying to learn basic math skills.
It was a great way to end the day, although I decided to stay up and watch the debate re-run, which ended up being 90 minutes of missed sleep. That wasn't smart because I went to bed at 2am and needed to be up at 5:30am for my flight back to Seattle. Oh well. It was an outstanding day, so it was all worth it.