I mentioned that I’m giving a talk this week at Women in Advanced Computing 2013 titled “The Mid-Career Donut Hole”.  I started out with the idea that there is a hole in the middle of your career, that hole is where women are the most likely to drop out of a technical career, and that there are steps that we as individual technical women can take to make it less likely that we and others drop out of technical careers.  With that idea, I wrote up an abstract and submitted it to speak at WiAC.

I’ve had the idea in the back of my head for months.  Ever since that idea arrived, I’ve been jotting down notes that are related to it.  As I’ve read books and articles, and they’ve led me to think about the topic more, I’ve fleshed out more of what might be included in the talk.  When I got the notification that my proposal had been accepted, I began working on it in earnest.  I first started looking at my notes and creating pieces of the talk, figuring out what would work and what wouldn’t work.  In working on those pieces, I spent a lot of time talking to myself in an empty room, to see if those pieces sounded good and felt natural when I talked about them.  Some things didn’t survive this cut, others were changed dramatically from their starting point.

When I felt like I had enough pieces that sounded right, I had to figure out how they fit together.  I had more pieces than I had time, but that’s okay: some of those pieces didn’t work in the context of a larger talk.  Some got cut, some got condensed.  New pieces got added when I discovered that I needed a bridge from one topic to the next.  I went from pieces that were related to this idea to a something that I hoped was a single cohesive discussion.

When I thought that I had the whole thing done, I stood in an empty conference room and gave the whole talk from start to finish.  This helped me be more comfortable with the talk as a whole, as well as identify places where it didn’t flow well.  More cutting ensued, as well as some new additions.  I tried again, felt more comfortable with it, and then rounded up a couple of colleagues to give me feedback on it.  They gave me fantastic feedback, which resulted in more revisions and more practice.

The talk is Thursday morning, 11am.  I really want to get this one right.  I’ll let you know how it goes.