Join Berlin Geekettes for an exciting evening for the screening of a new documentary she++. This film aims to “inspire girls, young and old, to take the lack of a Y chromosome and make a girl’s vision unique and useful in the world of code.” 

We will kick off this screening with two talks from an engineer and cofounder of frestyl, Johanna Brewer, followed by a talk from Martin Gorner, engineer and head of Developer Relations at Google. 

Special thanks to Google and Factory for sponsoring and hosting this exciting event. 

Please RSVP if you can 100% attend, there are only 50 seats available for this event next Wednesday. Food and beverages will be provided, compliments of Google. 

You can register here: http://sheplusplusberlingeekettes.eventbrite.com

The Program: 

1st Talk:

The Unstoppable Train: How I became an engineer before I knew I had a choice

Johanna Brewer 

Live music nerd. Co-founder of frestyl. Developer, designer, ethnographer & long-suffering vegetarian. Doctor (the PhD kind) of Information & Computer Sciences (University of California). Designed location-based, mobile interfaces for Intel. Developed algorithms for scientific research at the Swiss National Super Computer and Massachusetts General Hospital.

2nd Talk:

Google App Engine: Architecture for the Cloud World? (20 min + Q&A)

Martin Gorner 

Martin is the Dev Relations program manager for Germany. He is passionate about science, technology, coding, algorithms and everything in between. Martin graduated from Mines Paris Tech, enjoyed his first engineering years in the computer architecture group of ST Microlectronics and then spend the next 11 years shaping the nascent eBook market, starting with the Mobipocket startup, which later became the software part of the Amazon Kindle and its mobile variants.

she++: 

The Documentary (12 min: TV-14 DL) energetically proclaims ‘Hello, World’ after following smart, creative, and trailblazing technologists hard at work in hi-tech. This short documentary collects research and inspirational pieces of Silicon Valley’s unsung heroes to galvanize us to explore our potential as ‘femgineers’. Written and directed by recent Stanford University good girls gone geek, Ayna Agarwal and Ellora Israni, she++: The Documentary encourages the future CEOs, the innovative engineers, the techies and the fuzzies, the sisters, cousins, and daughters, to break away from the stereotype into a revolutionary field. As technology is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, all demographics must harness new ideas to transform and empower technology. Think of what more ‘femgineers’ could do.

Hosted at the Factory 

Factory is a 16,000 square meter campus in the heart of Berlin. Six buildings adjacent to the former Berlin wall provide state-of-the-art workspace, leisure amenities, and a physical location to network for startups and mature technology companies from Berlin and beyond. Residents include 6Wunderkinder, SoundCloud, and Mozilla, and Factory is partnered with Google for Entrepreneurs. Initiated in late 2011 by two serial entrepreneurs and private investors, the Factory will officially open in the summer of 2013. 

Post written by Jess Erickson, Founder of Berlin Geekettes

Yesterday, over 500 technology-curious conference goers descended upon Central Hall Westminster for LeWeb’s second year in London. Attendees listened to leaders of the New Sharing Economy, connected with like-minded people and discussed a movement that represents a major economic, social and cultural shift in our world + today. Berlin Geekettes was there to learn about emerging digital marketplaces and more importantly, find the leading ladies of Europe who were rocking the tech scene in London. 

First stop was breakfast at Priya Prakash’s place near Elephant and Castle. We met Priya earlier that year in Berlin while she was building her company at an incubator called hub:arum. She is the founder of Design for Social Change and Changify - a mobile crowd funding platform for better neighborhoods. This is a woman to be watched and of course she is always welcome back to Germany to visit the Berlin Geekettes! We miss her dearly.  

After a spot of tea, we ran over to LeWeb and met up with Magdalena Kron and Robyn Exton who run Geek Girl Meetup in London. GGM is an un-conference for geeky girls and women interested in web, code and start ups. We discussed creating an exchange program where 30 Berlin Geekettes could travel to London and 30 Geek Girls would head out to Berlin. The exchange would allow ladies to learn more about each other’s startups but also get a glimpse into each other’s respective tech hubs. In the near future, we’ll be setting up a one day conference on July 13th. If you’re interested in becoming a speaker, apply here: http://www.geekgirlmeetup.de. 

After lunch, we popped back into LeWeb and listened to IBM software engineer - turned - founder, Leah Busque. She discussed her work and inspiration for founding Task Rabbit, an errand outsourcing service that really empowered the unemployed during the recession. “When I launched the community in Boston, I realized that many of the people who were using the platform were recently laid off. The community included lawyers, pharmacists, young professionals and stay-at-home moms.” She doesn’t believe Taskrabbit emerged from the recession, but sees it as a phenomenon where micro-entrepreneurs started to emerge and took work into their own hands. We hope they’ll launch in Berlin soon as we’ve got a long laundry list of things we could use an extra pair of hands for!

After the talk, we meandered our way through the crowds and ran into 3 outstanding ladies who were really shaking things up across Europe. We asked them what they were working on and to list one challenge that they faced over this past year, and how they overcame it: 

Maeva Tordo: is developing the Blue Factory which is a startup incubator of ESCP Europe helping brave and social innovative startups grow in Paris, London, Madrid, Berlin and Torino.

“One of the biggest challenges I faced this year has been the European expansion of the Blue Factory. Initiated in September 2012 in Paris, the development of the incubator in Berlin couldn’t be a simple copy paste of the program. Understanding the local ecosystem, getting to know the main actors, identifying the needs and best value proposition the Blue Factory could offer without reinventing the wheel. The best way to solve this challenge has been to listen and observe a lot and then meet amazing local coordinators who are now developing the Blue Factory in Berlin and Madrid keeping the essence of the incubator philosophy and creating new relevant bricks for the program in the ‘lean and agile incubator’ spirit.” 

Hanna Aase: Founder of Wonderloop.me, an off the record networking app that captures who you are as a person, your dreams and goals and strives to make an impact in people’s lives that we don’t even know yet. Think new people = new opportunities.

“Biggest challenge: the chicken and egg problem. No one will invest in an idea and if you don’t code than you need to have resources to pay. Looking for a technical co-founder might be easy if you live in a city with a tech environment but I have lived in a small town in Norway all my life, even a flight away from Oslo so its been a challenge from all views. Than I got a decline from the Norwegian government on funding that TechCrunch wrote about and that caused a wave in Norway that’s also been a challenge as they froze me out after that for being in TechCrunch. I then flew to Silicon Valley and have been in New York a lot. We now have some of the biggest companies and founders in the world on board and after that it all goes a lot easier but the road up to now has been a 1.5 year long one.” 

Ayelet Noff: Founder and Co-CEO of Blonde 2.0 - helps companies big and small create brand awareness through social media tools and engage with consumers and influencers in the most personalized manner.

“Biggest challenge - As Blonde 2.0 has been expanding globally, I’ve needed to learn how to manage locally while traveling globally all the time. I’ve learnt that everything can be done virtually and at the same time I’m more productive since I am able to evangelize the companies that we are working with all over to the world to the top leaders of the tech space.” 

It was inspiring to hear more about their work and you could really sense the passion these talented ladies had for their future projects/companies. I was excited to find more female founders in London and last stop of the day would be the home of Courtney Boyd Myers, a friend and former fellow colleague at General Assembly who is now developing her own business called audience.io, an audience development studio for startups in New York and London.

I’m so lucky to have a friend that not only enjoys connecting people in tech but also over a delicious meal. In celebration of our next chapter, she encouraged me to invite a few friends over and together we climbed up to her gorgeous rooftop in Islington and sipped on prosecco as the sunset over London. Later that evening, in true CBM fashion, she whipped up a delicious fish dish as we swapped stories with Itaxso del-Palacio, co-founder at Foudersfit (who brushed us up on some financing basics and valuations).

In the end, I was truly inspired by the ladies I had met on this trip to London. Many thanks to LeWeb for giving me the opportunity to connect, learn and grow. I hope to be returning soon and look forward to learning more about London’s burgeoning tech hub. 

Meet Paula Laurel Jackson, founder of Kiddify.

Interviewed by Sabine Geithner.

First of all, tell us a little bit about yourself. You hold a PhD in Education, when and how did you discover your passion for teaching and education?

Quite honestly, I have always held a passion for teaching and education. As a child, I used to pretend that I was a teacher and convert our playroom into a cool classroom where I would offer “classes” to my brothers. 

I also spent most of my time creating; writing stories, plays, songs, creating puppet shows, cooking and talk shows…. The sky was my limit. Kids around the neighbourhood of all ages came flocking to my home to catch the latest “episode” which I presented to them. Soon enough they all were inspired to do join in, adding their own bits and pieces or creating their own shows. We all helped each other out, learned from each other and we all felt special-because this was our world-our space for us and by us! 

What I loved most was that our activities brought everyone together, all the popular kids, the bullied kids; everyone had a role in our world; everyone had something to offer and it was magical. My biggest dream was to find ways to spread this great idea to other kids everywhere because I felt very strongly that children had great power in connecting to others, teaching and learning from each other in ways that only kids could do; and I knew that it was something special. As soon as we began school, these creative adventurous shows came to a screeching halt. School matters took over and my dreams quickly dissipated into the routine of school life.



What did / do you love most about your work?

Well, I started off as a concert pianist at a really young age, and although I loved it-I felt a need to work with children and somehow give back via other means.



You used to consult for government agencies. How did that shape your view on education / the educational system.

Oh well…I was really naïve I think when I entered into the sector, believing that one could initiate change from above. I grew up in a rather privileged household, having access to the best of the best so-to-speak; being able to live my creativity, nourish my curiosity, travel around the globe and learn about the world first hand. The issues that always deeply concerned and bothered me as a child were those, which related to the poverty, disaffection and social inequality, I observed in many countries.

I initially thought that education was key to solving these issues. Then it became clear to me that the education systems, as they are structured actually exacerbated, if not created these problems. The systems were designed to create a particular response for individuals to function in a world that no longer exists; they neither embrace nor honour individuals as multi-faceted beings with a plethora of skills, talents, perspectives, and intelligences.  



You are currently running a crowd-funding campaign for your own project kiddify.com – to raise seed capital to create a video platform for children. Can you tell us a little bit about that project?

KIDDIFY is really my childhood dream coming to life; a video platform for kids to share their skills and talents with their peers across the globe. I had the chance to do a great deal of field research and surveys with thousands of teachers, parents and kids around the world. I wanted to explore the habits and Internet needs of children under 15. As a result of that fieldwork, it became clear what I needed to do!



Child Internet safety is a big issue. How do you make sure that children won’t get to see inappropriate content?

This is indeed our number one priority. We will employ a number of mechanisms to maintain a high level of security of our users. Before launching, we have to obtain the various certification options for children’s online privacy globally. Each certification stipulates a number of rules, to which our platform has to abide. Our main goal is to maintain a community environment of respect, connection and discovery across cultures in a safe and moderated environment. 


How did you get the idea for that platform?

The idea evolved from the research that emerged and my experiences working with children in schools. You allow students to become experts at things that they enjoy doing and it is powerful to see the sense of ownership, gratification and empowerment that follows. It also enables them to be proud of their skills and talents, which may not necessarily be seen or honoured within the classroom. The fact is that children are increasingly spending more time online-a great concern for parents and teachers. So, I also wanted to serve the critical need of connecting the offline lives of the students with their online activities, to enrich their online experiences, making it more creative, valuable and enriching.



Why did you decide to leave your safe position as an education consultant to venture out into the muddy waters of entrepreneurship? I imagine it takes a lot of courage. 

It became clear that if I really wanted to achieve my personal goal of empowering children around the world, consulting was not going to be the way. Apart from that, I was always telling those children with whom I worked to always follow their dreams; to follow their hearts-and I was not taking my own advice. So, the time came. I also am working with amazing mentors, who present wonderful life examples, such as Verena Delius. Their entrepreneurship journey, stories of dedication and success continue to fuel me, inspire me and really keep me going. I also have a great deal of support from my family, which is awesome!



What advice would you give to women who are hesitating to start their own businesses?

I think that if there is hesitation, then they are not ready. It needs to come from within, with 100 percent conviction, I think. And then, once the decision is made:

The three most important points I would says are to:

1. Never loose sight of your vision.
2. Find mentors and get advice from those who have “been there and done that”. 
3. Always be honest to yourself and follow your gut instinct.

This is what I have gained thus far in knowledge and know that there are many further lessons to come!

Support her campaign with a donation at: http://igg.me/at/kiddify/x/1292050

Guest post by hy! Berlin

The third edition of hy! is back again in Berlin with a massive TV-show style extravaganza at Radialsystem V on Sunday, June 2nd. The inimitable Milo Yiannopoulos will be taking to the stage at the beautiful RADIALSYSTEM V to talk with friends in media and technology about the latest industry trends and host a thought-provoking discussion about how these fast-paced developments impact our lives.

The show will also feature our trademark startup competition in the style of TV’s X-Factor or Das Supertalent. Five startups will pitch their companies in front of the audience and our expert judges for the chance to win €30,000 in cash and many other prizes. Colette Ballou, public relations expert and president of Ballou PR will be joined by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim and Alicia Navarro, founder and CEO of Skimlinks, to give their honest appraisal of each pitch.

Ditte Wulff of 23 will be taking part in a panel discussion about replacing yourself as CEO and Ida Tin is going to talk talk about the quantified self movement and her new app Clue, which allows in-depth tracking of your monthly cycle.

We’ve always loved the Berlin Geekettes community, and we’re happy to give ten free tickets to you guys.

We hope to see you at hy!

Note from Berlin Geekettes: Tickets were given to ten Geekettes who are super excited to join the event. We thank hy! for the invitations!

Blog post by Amélie Anglade and Johanna Brewer

Buzzwords kicks off on Monday and some of you might still be wondering what’s so exciting about open source, scalable search, data-analysis and NoSQL-databases. We sat down (in front of our inboxes) with Galina Hinova, who’ll be giving a talk at Buzzwords, to ask her more about life on the frontier of big data.

Hi Galina. You’re a Project Manager at IntraFind Software AG, working on Search applications. Can you tell us more about what you do there and what your everyday work look like?

First of all I want to thank the Berlin Geekettes blog for the interest in me and my work. At IntraFind we are working in the area of enterprise search. For most people search is an input box on a webpage. But we at IntraFind do not think so narrowly about search. We are convinced that since the beginning of mankind people have been searching. Let me propose an experiment. Take a piece of paper and a pen and write down all the things you look for in a day. It starts early in the morning. Take me as an example: I always search for my front door key. Or you look outside your window and it is raining, so you have to search for your umbrella, etc. You will be surprised how often you search every day. 

So search is more than just software?

Enterprise search is not only about a nice working piece of software. It is about knowing the needs of our customers even if they are not spoken out loud, knowing their infrastructure and problems and picking out the right strategy for your customer. You have to know the methods, the strategies, what is possible and what not. 

If you’re saying every search application is unique, how do you approach the problem?

I would describe my job as project manager for enterprise search like piecing a puzzle. I have a set of different modules, strategies, methods, software, skills, nice colleagues and for every customer I need to create a great picture which he can put on his wall – in my case behind the search box of his internet or intranet. So it starts with what does the customer really want, what are the requirements on customer side, what is the best way to get the right solution, how can we best implement this and deliver the right solution to the customer. I am responsible for all this from the beginning till the end of a project. Of course there is a lot of routine but there is also a lot of innovation and creativity in my job, because no customer is like the others.

How did you end up helping people find what they are looking for? What’s your background?

Well, I have a really exotic start in the field of information retrieval and search. I studied German linguistics in Sofia. Then one day I took part in a course on computational linguistics for linguists and the topic just fascinated me. I was excited to learn more and more and one day, about two years later, I found myself as a student of computational linguistics in Munich, Germany. There, I wrote my master thesis on information retrieval and my professor helped me find my first job. It happened to be a firm which offered services in the field of enterprise and internet search. Over time, I transitioned from implementing search solutions to managing the implementation of search solutions. That’s the short version and the long one has much more about giving something up for getting something else, downs and ups, trails and fails and so on. What I have learned from my own story is to keep at it, to work for it and one day it happens.

I imagine things have changed as you’ve been working in the field. Lately it seems like Open Source Software solutions, with projects like Lucene and Solr from the Apache Software Foundation, seem to be key to the Search (and even more generally Big Data) industry. Why is that? Can you tell us more about the Open Source community and mentality in your field?

Open source solutions in the field of search like Lucene and Solr are very popular. In my opinion the reason for this is that Lucene and Solr do not cost a lot. You can download Lucene on your home PC, grab the Lucene in Action book and in a couple of days you have a running search engine. Maybe you don’t know all about search, big data, Lucene but it costs very little money and effort to reach your first success. The entry to the search world can be so easy, for everyone. This is the charm and the great thing about open source software. 

So Open Source rules? Case closed?…

Well, on the other side, there are the commercial search engines, for which you have to pay a license fee. And for this you get much more than a core search engine. For example the iFinder, IntraFind’s search software is Lucene based. We have added a lot of goodies which a Lucene engine doesn’t provide and our customers can use them out of the box without implementing them by themselves. We have, for example, integrated a Tagging Service for NER (named entity recognition), a TopicFinder for document classification and a lot of other great stuff. 

Okay, so there’s benefits to Open Source and Commercial Search. How do you choose?

The decision for a company is mostly, do I want to invest every year in an employee who can implement a search engine for my company or should I get a software license. The truth is that a software license is much cheaper than a software developer and the licensed software can do much more out of the box than the open source software.

Where’s the cutting edge now? How are the cool kids doing things?

Fifteen to twenty years ago the search engine companies started from university projects with their own cores. Think about FAST, now a Microsoft subsidiary, or Autonomy, now owned by HP, or Endeca, now owned by Oracle. Younger search engine companies like IntraFind, Attivio, etc. do not invest in core implementation. Instead, they use the Lucene core and build their software on it. We at IntraFind have for example two Lucene committers. Even in the scene of commercial search engines there is a shifting from do-it-your-self to pump-it-up-by-your-self. I don’t mean it ironically, because Lucene has proven itself in the last years to be a great open source software. So why reinvent the wheel if there is Lucene ;-).

How can a (beginner) developer get started learning Search and Information Retrieval? What advice do you have?

First of all, you have to want it and you have to keep at it, even if there are some difficulties or disappointments. Second, there are a lot of great books about the topic. I will start with the Information Retrieval Bible. It is called “Modern Information Retrieval” and almost everyone I know, from developers to managers, who are working professionally in the search scene has read it. Then of course you can try to run your own search engine, for example with Lucene. A lot of things you learn just by doing them. So get to know the theory, there are some important rules and best practices you can read about, and then get to know the praxis, there are several nice open source search engines, which you can play with in your sandbox. One day you will be confident enough to break the rules and create your own best practices.  But the most important one is: Do not give up!

In a few days you will be at the Buzzwords conference. What are you looking forward to doing/seeing there (other than yourself ;)?

I am really excited about it. I hope to meet some interesting people there, some old friends. My calendar for a sit down with a Berliner beer is already pretty full. But I also hope to meet some new faces. I am curious about new ideas and use cases in the field of search, big data, and data analysis. I am pretty sure I will go home from Berlin Buzzwords with new inspiration for my own work.

Of course there is also my talk, which I will give at the conference. Edit Kiss, project manager at MAN Truck & Bus AG and I will be happy to show a real life project about a search base application, on which we are working right now. It is about the After Sales Portal at MAN Truck and Bus and we will speak about some design decisions for this application. The challenge of the project is to get many different kinds of very specific data in just one application. But I do not want to reveal everything. If you are curious I will be happy to meet you at Berlin Buzzwords.

If you’ve been inspired to dive headfirst into search, and if you’d like to hear more from Galina in person, send our Tech Ambassador Amélie an email (amelie@berlingeekettes.com) with a short explanation of why you should be the lucky Geekette to snag a free ticket to Buzzwords. Please send us your emails by Friday, May 31st at Midnight!

Meet Candy Behunin, Head of European Marketing/PR and Events at HitFox.

Interviewed by Lina Chong, Analyst at Hasso Plattner Ventures.

Welcome to Berlin! What brings you to our sexy tech city?

I joined the Fox team to become their Head of European Marketing/PR and Events. Being a fox really means being quick on your feet because our startup has an amazing growth potential – and every day we push it to the next level.

You are now a woman in a role of leadership, but coming from social media, what were some of the criticisms of your job of online communications?

Adopting the right voice can be a challenge for people. Social media is an online personality – I would normally suggest you decide if you are your brand or separate from your brand(s). People have to be aware of which persona they create online, it can be vulnerable, permanent and even damaging to a reputation because you quickly attract admirers or haters or even worse – indifference meaning no one is paying attention. Try to stick with one theme and be an expert in it – or be extremely entertaining, those are your best bets in developing a following. Criticisms in social media is that sometimes people share too much content. Sometimes a bit of mystery never hurts, right?

What are some of the responsibilities a social media maven has?

Depends on who you are and what your goals are. Ultimately, your responsibility is to make sure your communication does not mislead anyone or create life damaging rumors or gossip, because news spreads like wildfire on the internet and can be permanent digital ink. It’s the old television principle where if it’s on the internet it “must be true”, much like how back in the day, if it was on television “it must be real” – but this was before reality tv hit the air and social media became a career. I mean, sometimes my mom would say to me, “So explain this to me Candy, people pay you to like things on Facebook and Tweet? I don’t understand how this relates to your law school education?!”

How did you get into social media or freelancing in general?

Basically I have always enjoyed creative expression and communication. In past times this was done through journals, writing articles finishing that great American novel. It was higher quality writing in former times, now with all this media, you reach a larger target but often I feel the quality in intellectual communication has slipped and so much information becomes fabricated because there is less barriers to publish writing online – it’s a free zone for anyone with a laptop and wifi to have a voice. I became a freelancer because I wanted a change from the corporate culture and to be honest, 80% of my life, I worked for myself as a sole proprietor, mainly in creative fields out of passion, without a heavy focus on profit, which made me more of a social entrepreneur at heart.

Also, since my German speaking ability is only a mere B1, it was competitive to take on roles that were appropriate for my skill level, due to the language barrier, so I created my own working possibilities by freelancing. Also, the visa büro informed me that I could not take jobs I was overqualified for, in the theory that I was stealing work from people who were not qualified to do what I do, so me taking their jobs was pigeon holing their opportunities? Thus, I became a freelancer.

What is your favorite thing (s) about being in Berlin?

Eating all the Asian food I want! Hamburg was beautiful but not so well adept in providing ethnic food options. Berlin just has options and opportunities along with great energy – besides, most of my friends are now here from school, I have always been an adopted local from Hamburg since several startups in this city have worked with me, and last but certainly not least – It’s the Year of the Fox, so I like to say at work “Once a Fox, always a Fox.” My new role is amazing, my CEO, Jan Beckers inspires me everyday by giving me freedom to experiment, while learning from his past experiences as a serial entrepreneur. I work with one of the best startup teams around – we’re international, we’re intelligent, and we’re loads of FUN. Amen to that! PS: We’re also hiring top talents, so if you feel like becoming a fox, contact me!

In November of last year, we introduced the first round of our mentorship program. Our goal was to give the women in our community an opportunity to receive guidance and connect with other women who have “been there and done it”.

So many of you applied to the program and we ended up with a spectacular pool of mentors and mentees. A total of 50 women, who were ready to learn and share experiences, kick-started the program.

As the mentor sessions moved along, we listened to your stories and collected your feedback. This launch was our pilot program and a chance for us to understand what your expectations and needs are. We took your suggestions, put our heads together and built a plan for a more structured and guided program. Thanks to everyone who participated and contributed with suggestions for improvement!

Needless to say, we are now totally stoked to announce the second round of the Berlin Geekettes Mentorship Program - and this time with a stellar supporter of the Berlin Geekettes community by our side:

Helping us realize the potential and positive outcomes of this program is Erin Gallagher of Google. Erin says:

“Google began as a startup in a garage and remains a startup at heart. The company is committed to helping build a vibrant ecosystem for startups and enabling the next generation of entrepreneurs to be successful. I feel really lucky to work for a company that values the development and growth of all it’s employees, and also supports the growth of local communities, and I am really excited to help bring some of this energy and support to the Geekettes Mentorship programme”

We are so grateful for Erin’s help and positive energy! She has been a member of our community for a while and we’re extremely happy to be collaborating with her on this program! Here’s to you Erin <3

On to the details:

Berlin Geekettes and Google will offer a 5-month long program that focuses on your professional and personal development. The program will kick-off on May 21st at the Google office here in Berlin.

Our goal is to connect you with inspiring women who lend their support while you are advancing your career, setting goals, and expanding your skills. 

Application Process

We are now accepting applications for mentors and mentees. The program is open to 30 mentors and 30 mentees. Just fill out this Google form, tell us a bit about yourself, and we will be in touch with you. We will match you based on your background, your expertise, areas of interests, and goals.

The application deadline is May 7th.

Program Resources

We will offer guidance and resources throughout the program. Each month carries a different theme that serves as fuel for your sessions and conversations with your mentor/mentee. These themes will serve as guidelines to give an idea of what you can accomplish together. You are of course free to chose your own topics during your mentoring sessions.

Monthly Events/Sessions

In addition to your individual meetings, we will host a group meeting for all mentors and mentees each month at the Google office. A speaker will join us to share her or his experience and insights on a topic that ties directly to the theme of the month. We will cover topics such as goal setting, realizing areas of improvement, maximizing strengths, negotiating, and interviewing skills.

Feedback Sessions

At halftime, we will hold a feedback session at the Google office to make sure you’re getting the most out of the program. 

Of course we will have plenty of networking opportunities throughout the program and a celebration at the end : )

We have so many wonderful women in our community and we hope you all consider being part of this program. Spread the word if you know someone who would like to become a mentor or mentee. 

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at denise@berlingeekettes.com

See you soon! Much love, 

Your Berlin Geekettes Team

By Jess Erickson, Founder of Berlin Geekettes