Guest Post by Abeer Albashiti, TechWomen Fellow from Jordan, Fall 2022 (reprinted from Medium)
The TechWomen fellowship contributed significantly to my professional trajectory after a hustle with Larimar. The opportunities and learning lessons are massive!!!
Sometimes it was overwhelming to absorb them as they are enormous!!! What I did and still do is create my net of advocates and mentors who support identifying synergies and keep in touch with them so that I continuously harness the value of the Bay Area ecosystem.
The fellowship design is perfect not only in structure but because of the genuineness of the TechWomen team. You feel like you get a new big family; it reminds me of the Leaders in Innovation Fellowship Program from the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Why it’s perfect?
Being able to isolate yourself and connect with new people is refreshing. During the fellowship, I reframed a lot of relationships and reshaped my life in a way that was more consistent with my inner self.
The Techwomen program has three structured components designed to provide an entertaining knowledge-acquisition experience: professional mentoring, cultural mentoring, and impact coaching. And here is a brief about each one of them with some photos:
The cultural pillar is the heart-touching one; we have connected with mentors on a personal level during our trips to the Bay Area. Of course, the endless talks about our cultures unite us and give us a space to accept diversity easily.
Thank you to our cultural mentors, Samera Edward & Zoe Schladow, for dedicating a lot of time to us. Here are some of our memories:
The second pillar is impact coaching, where we propose a national impact project related to women in STEM. And for Jordan, it is the ‘Connect Science’ initiative for female researchers.
The idea is to connect women researchers on the implementation level by sharing labs’ access and resources. Our impact coaches, Veronika Oget, Christina Thyrring-Jackson, and Hosai Omarkhil, supported creating the action plan, and our team has started the execution by getting governmental approvals.
Here are our coaches with the Jordan team; Amna Ramdan, Duaa Abuarqoup, and myself:
The third priceless pillar of the Techwomen program is professional mentoring, where we had been hosted at top deep tech companies in the Bay Area; fortunately, I was hosted by Marvell Technology.
The mentoring team there is super active and passionate to enable each of us. My dears Cora Lam, Seena Shankar, Keh-Chiang Ku, Nayanika Diwadkar, Nithya Mani, Lyndsi Parker, Shailja Garg, and Sandeep Bharathi, Thanks a million!
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