BYU Women's Conference (28-29 Apr 2011)

This was my first time attending Women's Conference. I have family members who go often or even faithfully, but I had never gone. Truly, I loved it! Even though I both dreaded and worried about it for the four months leading up. :)

Women's Conference is an annual two-day educational retreat for LDS women, held at BYU (my alma mater!) and attended mostly by locals (though there are those who fly in or drive from great distances). Every session contains real-life advice mingled with spiritual and religious instruction. Each day starts and ends with a general session, a religious keynote address given by leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Between these opening and closing general sessions, there are three sessions each day of concurrent classes attendees need to choose between.

I presented in one of those classes, on Friday morning. Let me say how much I loved working with my assigned partner, Dr. Rachel Crook-Lyon. Not only was she really easy to work with, but also she had two paid graduate students to assist her. This was a beautiful thing—they made all the visuals for our presentation (no need for me to whip up a Power Point presentation!) and best of all, they met with the A/V tech crew at 7:30 Friday morning, thereby enabling me to sleep at least an hour longer. So I feel really blessed to have been paired with her.

Our topic was "Staying Safe With Social Technology". Each of us had things we really wanted to cover, so we divided the subject more or less in half and each of us were responsible for our own research on benefits, risks, and safety principles, and for sculpting it into a presentation. Then in the weeks leading up to the presentation we met several times to make it into one cohesive whole. We decided that it made more sense to present all the benefits at once, the risks at once, and then the safety principles at once, rather than having one of us go through their entire presentation and then turn the time over to the other one. So we stood at the podium together and alternated speaking.





The graduate students were building our original visual presentation in Prezi, which IMO kicks Power Point's butt. But it was new to them and it's web-based and there were technical difficulties galore, and with only 22 hours to go they had to give up and start over in Power Point. So Rachel and I didn't know each others' slides well enough and we didn't click through just right while the other was presenting. No matter. :) It turned out fine.

The 703 person room capacity was really worrying me, but luckily our class was not in high demand to begin with. We probably started out with fewer than 200 people, which was a huge relief. We were able to start out strong and not-nervous, so that when even more trickled in over the course of the presentation (as they got turned away from more popular classes, we probably ended up with around 350) we were already in the groove and it didn't scare me.

We got some positive feedback from attendees. B, my mom and dad, MIL, SIL Mary, and nieces Peggy, Marianne, and Lucy all attended to give me moral support. :) It was such a relief when it was over, but I'm not joking when I say that I am glad and grateful that I had the opportunity to be involved.

I also loved the other classes and presentations I attended. Each one had nuggets of goodness, laughs (ever heard 3000+ ladies laughing together with no male rumble to counter the higher voices?), even tears. By Friday evening I was exhausted and uplifted. :)