Big Girl

Well, it's amazing how many things can come out of one little trip...

An item about my trip to Girls' High appeared on our company intranet earlier this week with a link to my blog post about it. This resulted in the page views on my blog quadrupling for a couple of days and a variety of senior staff members pulling me aside to tell me they thought my blog was great and comment on a variety of things. The positive feedback has been really encouraging and people have been very supportive of some of the ideas I've been writing about and providing more ideas and resources to help me achieve what I want to. Good times!

I also had a female colleague get really enthusiastic about doing more school visits with me to keep promoting IT to the next generation of girls. There's a few people who've expressed interest now and we're all meeting up next week to "come up with girl power strategies". It's a really neat feeling when other people start jumping on your bandwagon. :) So we're now looking at publishing an article, offering to speak at some Wellington High Schools, perhaps visiting the Universities too, hosting a work visit for keen students and a Bring Your Daughter To Work Day! Exciting times, especially when some company directors are included in the group of interested supportive people.

This morning I received a really sweet card signed by the girls I spoke to last week and a letter from their teacher as well to say thanks. It was a very warm fuzzy moment reading all their comments - I was amazed at how many of them said they were considering IT as a career now! It turns out the class teacher also sent a thank you letter to my boss... which resulted in him nominating me (at some length) for our weekly award this week.

Overall, it's been a very warm fuzzy day/week on all counts!

Some of the warm fuzzies have been pretty scary too. Mostly as a result of me taking on a Team Lead role now but partly, I think, from the sheer amount of publicity I've gotten lately I'm doing / being asked to do lots of things I would never have imagined doing at this point in time. Notably:

• Needing to get a 'Sales' code for my time sheet
  
• Organising and running meetings with clients
• Not having enough time to do what I had planned because of meetings, things to follow up, queries from people etc
• Doing time and cost estimates for whole pieces of work
• Spending an evening mingling with and amusing clients for a client function
• Being asked to help interview someone (next week)

I was complaining to my project manager about this this afternoon - "Lots of scary things are happening this week!" - her response was: "Yes, you're a big girl now!". Don't get me wrong, it's great, exciting and a privilege; I just can't help but find it all a little scary sometimes when I start to wonder if I'm really worthy of the confidence people are placing in me. All I can do is try to be as worthy as I can I guess! And cover my monitors with post-it notes to avoid forgetting things.

I've been musing that this is something else to talk to any future groups of high school students about - as being somewhat unique to the IT industry I think. This is an industry where companies are growing fast and people have an opportunity to grow incredibly fast if they want to. It's not that long ago that I was a lowly new graduate who had to ask her mentor what a stored procedure was...