{"id":259,"date":"2013-09-12T11:15:32","date_gmt":"2013-09-12T01:15:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/girl-germs.com\/?p=259"},"modified":"2015-09-27T15:10:59","modified_gmt":"2015-09-27T05:10:59","slug":"tech-ed-tipsntricks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/girl-germs.com\/?p=259","title":{"rendered":"Tech.Ed Tips&#8217;n&#8217;Tricks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m sure other people have done this before (in fact I know someone has, and I promise I&#8217;m not ripping it off!) but I figured I&#8217;d share my tips and tricks from attending Tech.Ed for other people who may not be as &#8216;aware&#8217; \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Phone &#038; battery &#8211; bring your mobile with you. It may seem silly, but ensure you have it on you at all times. You&#8217;ll need to keep in contact with any work mates who&#8217;ve come down with you and if you&#8217;re into social media side of stuff at Tech.Ed, you&#8217;ll definitely want it for that. Also, PUT IT ON SILENT. I realise this is an obvious one, but it&#8217;s just general politeness &#8211; you don&#8217;t want to be in a session and have your &#8220;Don&#8217;t you think I&#8217;m sexy!&#8221; ringtone play out. Also, if you can, bring a backup battery. If your phone isn&#8217;t particularly new, you may find it is dead by the end of the day and it can be a REALLY long day (start at 8:15am and go through to 1-2am).<\/li>\n<li>Charge cables &#8211; this is obvious. Bring along your charge cables. You will undoubtedly need them. Forgetting them just makes you super sad when your phone\/tablet\/laptop dies.<\/li>\n<li>Twitter &#8211; join <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/\">Twitter<\/a>. I wasn&#8217;t a Twitterer. I joined for my first Tech.Ed. I do not regret it. I&#8217;ve made so many amazing contacts through it, so many good friends and I&#8217;ve been able to keep up with so much information. Just *DO IT* \ud83d\ude1b <\/li>\n<li>Business Cards &#8211; take business cards with you. Even if you don&#8217;t have them through work, get some printed. They&#8217;re not expensive. They&#8217;re great ways of being able to give you information to people so that they won&#8217;t forget you the minute you walk away. This works in the reverse &#8211; collect as many business cards as you can, build up your network!<\/li>\n<li>Talk to EVERYONE &#8211; following on from previous point, talk to EVERY SINGLE PERSON YOU CAN! It&#8217;s always good to expand your network and the people you&#8217;ll meet at Tech.Ed may just be able to help you out down the track with that annoying problem you&#8217;ve got, or helping you get that job you really want.<\/li>\n<li>Sleep as much as you can &#8211; Sleep is *REALLY* important. I don&#8217;t know if any other tips&#8217;n&#8217;tricks for Tech.Ed have this, but I feel it&#8217;s necessary to put it in. NAPS ARE AWESOME. If you can catch a half hour nap, it can keep you goign for another few hours. This can be important if you&#8217;re up from 7am and going through all the way to 1 or 2am.<\/li>\n<li>Plan your time &#8211; seriously, it seems obvious, but so many people I know who go to Tech.Ed don&#8217;t pre-plan their schedule. It&#8217;s really important, even if you only do it on the first day there. It gives you an idea of how much you&#8217;re trying to cram into each day, which sessions you really want to attend and if possible rank them &#8211; if there are sessions you MUST see, get to those sessions at least 15 minutes early to ensure you&#8217;ll get a seat. Also, see if you can wrangle a blank session each day &#8211; this will give you time to chat to vendors, to use the hands-on lab environment or to catch that quick nap you need to keep going.<\/li>\n<li>Dress comfortably &#8211; this may be REALLY obvious for  guys, but for girls? Not so much. Do not wear heels. Just don&#8217;t. You will be walking around for most of the day, so make sure you&#8217;re wearing comfortable shoes. Bring a jacket &#8211; the rooms can be absolutely freezing, but outside it can be 30 degrees. But make sure you&#8217;re still dressing professionally &#8211; you&#8217;re associating with colleagues, prospective colleagues and prospective employers. You want to make a good impression.<\/li>\n<li>Evaluate &#8211; I know all speakers push this, but I&#8217;m going to push it harder. EVALUATE EVERY SESSION YOU ATTEND! It is *so* important. If you don&#8217;t provide evaulations, how do the speakers and the coordinators of Tech.Ed know how to put together next years event to make it even better? It only takes a few minutes and it seriously does help.<\/li>\n<li>Have fun &#8211; this is obvious, but also important. Try and have fun. Yes, it&#8217;s a conference. Yes, your work has (probably) sent you to get information. But if you don&#8217;t have fun, it was be an insane drag. You want the week to be enjoyable because then it will be memorable!<\/li>\n<p>That&#8217;s it for me for tips. If I think of anything else &#8211; or people let me know I&#8217;ve missed something, I&#8217;ll throw it in! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m sure other people have done this before (in fact I know someone has, and I promise I&#8217;m not ripping it off!) but I figured I&#8217;d share my tips and tricks from attending Tech.Ed for other people who may not be as &#8216;aware&#8217; \ud83d\ude42 Phone &#038; battery &#8211; bring your mobile with you. It may seem silly, but ensure you&#8230; <a href=\"https:\/\/girl-germs.com\/?p=259\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10,328,9],"tags":[109,111,110,98,107,108],"class_list":["post-259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferences","category-techstuff","category-training","tag-network","tag-schedule","tag-sleep","tag-tech-ed","tag-tips","tag-tricks"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2Tmk1-4b","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/girl-germs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/girl-germs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/girl-germs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/girl-germs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/girl-germs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=259"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/girl-germs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":260,"href":"https:\/\/girl-germs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions\/260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/girl-germs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/girl-germs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/girl-germs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}