From CFP proposal to Conference Talk: My journey to speaking at a conference

Ever since attending my first conference in 2018, I've always looked up to the speakers who were presenting, which in turn has really helped to elevate my work based on what I learned. Fast-forward today and I've attended four Smashing Conferences in some amazing cities (San Francisco, Toronto and Freiburg, Germany). Working in the non-profit sector over the last 7+ years has taught me valuable lessons which I want to share with others in the community. The areas in which I'll need the most polishing are in the following areas:

• Practicing speaking in front of groups while making eye contact and speaking clearly.
• Getting over imposter syndrome.
• Structuring conference presentation main points.

Public speaking, ever since high school, has often been a weakness of mine. I'm often thinking about the tone of my voice or making sure I'm not saying "umm" or "uhh" too much while speaking in front of a group. Over the past year, I feel like my confidence with this has grown more than it has in a while. The department I work in has hosted educational sessions about the services we offer to our colleges. This has given me the opportunity to carve out time to get practice speaking in front of a group of around 25 people.

As I was filling out my first application to speak at a conference, I started having doubts of whether I was qualified to speak or even have my proposal accepted. Melanie Lindahl, who I recently connected with in the Digital Collegium Slack group, has been amazing in calming my worries about these thoughts. Her advice was to not overthink it and just submit it. After this brief chat with her, that's exactly what I did. I put my head down to focus on the description, elevator pitch and learning outcomes. Clicking that SUBMIT button to send in my proposal was very satisfying. I started picturing some of the slides that I could possibly create and seeing myself in front of a room full of engaged and like-minded community of individuals who want to see me succeed in my talk and learn something that might help them in their careers.

The name of the talk I submitted for the Digital Collegium (formerly HighEdWeb)conference is Design Systems: Bridging the Gap Between Designers and Developers. I purposely used the word "Bridging" as part of the title to use it as a metaphor for representing connection, transition and overcoming obstacles. Whether a team of project managers, developers or designers have been working together for days or years, I feel the bridge is a great symbol for getting a web project from one side to the other in the most time efficient and reliable way.

Stay tuned for future posts regarding these main areas, along with a few others mixed in, as I go on this journey to speaking at my first conference.