Hello! My name is Iliuza and I’m 4th year bachelor student in Computer Science, Innopolis University, Russia. I got chance to participate in CHI 2019 conference in Glasgow, UK, winning ACM-W scholarship and here is what I got from the conference. I had 2 goals before I went there – 1) to see the current situation in HCI to be able to participate in the next year conference as an author with the research in retail I work on and 2) to make contacts with other women-scientists in the field. I got the vision of the works presented on the conference and understood that I need to focus more on the vision of future because today’s things already became outdated. One more thing I figured out was that Russia is super underrepresented country in HCI, despite the fact we have so many advanced researches in IT which deserve to be presented on the world conferences. I did a little research after the conference and found that there’s no SIGCHI chapters and only 1 CHI related community in Russia that is located in Moscow, although Russia is huge and has a lot of universities in IT related fields located in other cities (our university is an example, it’s located in Innopolis, near Kazan). During the conference I met numerous successful women in HCI related fields and was inspired by their stories. No one had easy way to achieve what they have now, however, constant work on their values and ideas allowed them to reach their goals. I communicated to these women and participated in Diversity & Inclusion lunch to discuss the topic more. I was fully inspired by those people. Although I knew that women at my university are really underrepresented group (~ 20% of all students), it was a big discovery for me that big work is to be done to inform women about existing opportunities and support them to feel more confident taking leader roles. I’ve supported girls in IT but only those who I know personally. I understood that this support should be done more globally within our university, and then more, on the country level. So now, after the conference, I have new 2 goals:

1. Inform Innopolis University about CHI field and conferences. As one of the steps, I did a presentation for master students where I shared my experience and talked about opportunities to be involved in the sphere.

2. Introduce Innopolis University women into opportunity of science career, conference participation.