Women in APIs - GET/Speaking Cohort program!!

Hello Peeps,

I came to know about “Women in APIs” community through Hannah, the technical community manager @ Postman. This community is a part of apidays. You can check more about the community here,

Women in APIs | apidays Global
Organisations need APIs, and APIs need people to bring them to life. At apidays, just like in the wider technology…www.apidays.global

This community includes people from diverse background and just one common factor between them is APIs. Once you apply for “Join the Community”, you need to fill in some basic details about you and submit.

Once your details are verified, you will be notified via email, so make sure to provide a valid email address. After this, you will be added to their slack channel and you get to meet many like minded people. You can seek or provide help to those who need.

Claire Barrett, sent me a welcome email and she added a note saying that they are having a couple of open slots for the upcoming “GET/Speaking” program. I checked and there were two time slots available, so I picked one based on my Time zone.

What is this program all about?

There are many talented people all over the world, some people come out of the shell and talk, some prefers to stay low. But if you are really looking up to something and want to improve your public speaking skills, this is one way to do that.

How does it work?

Once you register based on the dates and your time zone, you will be getting the confirmation email. Total of four sessions, where in each of them is planned fortnight same time.

First three sessions would be peer to peer, along with the facilitators.

For the final and the fourth session you will be tagged to a volunteer who is willing to mentor you for 1.5 hrs. You can utilize this session to clear your doubts with the experienced speaker or volunteer.

My Experience on these four sessions:

Session 1 — Seizing the Opportunity

This is more of an introductory session, where in we get to know more about the people in the cohort. Total of seven women from different regions of the world.

We talked about our technology, how are we connected to API’s, what’s the best we are looking on to this program, what are the struggles which we face when we are about to talk public, Imposter syndrome etc.. This was an informal session and we are just flowing with our thoughts. We discussed about the opportunities where we can talk or present? What are the challenges we face? What is the one thing that holds us back? What makes us a good public speaker?

End of the session, Claire and Yojas consolidated the take away.

What are your reflections so far?

What have you learnt?

They asked us to come up with something interesting for the upcoming session. We were asked to reach minimum five people from our family/friends/colleagues and ask them about the first five words to describe us. This was really fun and exciting. I reached out to few of my people and asked their feedback and it was amazing. I was so shocked about their perception about me. I am not that bad!!

Also post this session, Claire shared us the transcript of our group chat.

Session 2 — Finding a topic for our upcoming talk or presentation

I got a chance to collect five words from five different people, and I was reading that many times.

Once the session is inaugurated, Claire asked us about the exercise which we were given during last session. We were all so excited about the sharing session. All of us shared how it felt to receive this kind of feedbacks. It was all about self-learning and self-exploration. We realized about our potentials, strengths and improvement areas etc.

Then we discussed on, How to do better brand ourselves? We can use some different title, headline, bio to stand out from others. I took this opportunity and shared my JSON intro which I am using for my public profiles.

{

“role” : “Passionate Test Engineer”,

“currentLocation” : “Malaysia”,

“aboutMe” : “A Mom ★ Postman Supernova ★ Blogger ★ API Enthusiast ★ Community Contributor ★ Learner ★ Enabler”

}

We discussed about the some attractive methods for better public presentation. One common thing we all could relate is “Stories”.

Audience love stories and they can easily relate it to them. So, having stories as part of your speech will help you to deliver the messages better to your audience , also with less distraction. Who doesn’t love stories huh?

We were asked to reminisce about the personal/professional stories which we can share it during our upcoming talks, and how are we planning to related those stories for our talk/presentations. Also to come up with a title and abstract to submit for “Call for Papers”.

Claire shared some links for example abstracts and other useful links to help preparing for our talks/webinars.

Session 3 — Preparing to talk/write

So this session started with Story telling. We were asked to share our story and the message or how do we relate that to our speech. We talked about how to fit in the story to our talks?

Also discussed about the technology or tools which we use or thinking to use during our webinars/presentations? People suggested their favorite tools for engaging the audience during the webinars or presentations.

We discussed about the real time experiences, examples.

Also Claire explained us about the upcoming session 4 process and informed us about the Mentors whom we are tagged to.

Session 4— One -to-one with the Mentor

After receiving the formal invite through the email, I got a chance to e-meet Melissa (she is a Field CTO, EMEA for Kong based in the UK) and I did a dry run of my future presentation with her.

We talked about APIs, our work experiences. She provided me suggestions/feedbacks on my presentation. It was a great experience meeting her, lot to learn from her.

I am working on her suggestions to improvise my public presenting/speaking skills.

That was the end of four sessions!

Overall, it was an amazing experience to connect with like minded people and to learn from them. I had a chance to expand my professional network and connect with new people.

I would like to thank everyone behind this ideology and helping other women to rise and shine!! Special Thanks to Claire, Yojas and Melissa.

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This post is originally published in https://bpricilla.medium.com/women-in-apis-get-speaking-cohort-program-b62455083ff8

You can also check the below post by Claire, where she is talking more about the “Women in APIs” initiative.

https://blogs.mulesoft.com/web-series/apis-unplugged/power-of-diversity-in-api-strategy/