Systers | Pakistani Women in Computing | Advancing Career Strategies From IC to Leadership Roles | Mentoring Circle

Session Overview:

Making the transition from Individual Contributor (IC) to leadership can be one of the most exciting and rewarding yet overwhelming moments in your career journey. You may begin to wonder:
-What are the tactical skills you need to be successful in your industry?
-How will you balance contributing with your technical expertise while also leaning into your leadership?
-How does your culture and experience play into your communication style and advocating for your team?

Join Pakistani Women in Computing as they share advice on how to set yourself up to successfully break into management and have the biggest impact on your organization. You’ll hear from mentors with experience in Engineering, Product, Data, Technology and Strategic Leadership roles at companies like Apple and Microsoft Azure.

Learn more about PWiC and all of the AnitaB.org Systers here. 

Mentoring Circles are a fun and fast-paced way of learning and engaging with a lot of people and information. To ensure you are properly prepped for the program, here’s a little intro into how Mentoring Circles work!
 
Each Mentoring Circle is based on a topic with 4-8 Mentors in attendance speaking about related subtopics.
 
1.       First the Mentors will introduce themselves and give an overview of what they will be discussing in each breakout room
2.       Next the AnitaB.org moderator will open up the breakout rooms
        a. Find the breakout rooms using the bottom of the zoom tool bar, the four square icon three apps in from the right will be the breakout rooms
            b. Each breakout room title and Mentor name will be listed
      c. Click the blue ‘Join’ button to join the breakout room of your choice
        d. If you are having trouble joining a breakout room add your name and desired room in the chat and an AnitaB.org staff member will move you
3.       Turn on your camera, this is a great time to engage with both the Mentor and the other Mentees who have similar interests to you
4.       Ten minutes after the breakout rooms are opened you will receive a prompt to move to your next room
        a. To move to your next room find the breakout rooms in your toolbar and choose from the list of rooms and click the blue ‘Join’ button
5.       There will be a total of five prompts to move to another breakout room
6.       At the end of the session the breakout rooms will close and everyone will be brought back to the main room for final remarks

Dr. Bushra Anjum, Ph.D., is a health IT data specialist currently serving as the Director of Data Science & Analytics for a San Francisco-based health tech firm Doximity. She leads a team of analysts, scientists, and engineers to create HIPAA-secure data-driven tools for over 1.8 million USA clinicians. Dr. Anjum is a celebrated speaker at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference, Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference, STARS Celebrations, and CRA-WP Grad Cohorts, to name a few. She has been recognized by Tribune as a Top 20 Under 40 Professional for career excellence with a deep commitment to community service. She has been nominated as the Volunteer Woman of the Year 2021 by the SLO County Commission on the Status of Women anda Girls. She is also a recipient of the LUMS VC Alumni Achievement Award for sustained excellence in engineering, and leadership in the profession and public affairs.

Farah Ali is the Vice President of Technology Growth Strategy at Electronic Arts. Prior to joining EA, she served as co-founder and CTO at FreightWeb, a venture capital-backed logistics tech startup working to optimize partial truckloads. With a sustained focus on deep technical roles, Farah began her technical career as an engineer at Microsoft after graduating with a degree in Computer Science.  She has held senior engineering leadership roles at Microsoft, eBay, and Electronic Arts. Her engineering experience is both deep and diverse: she has worked on everything from shrink-wrap products to online services, large-scale distributed systems, and machine learning & AI. Her passion for innovation, entrepreneurship, and learning has led her to be involved in the startup community through investing, advising, and board service. She is a board advisor at the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Washington, a technical advisor at Madrona Venture Labs, and sits on the boards of a few startups. It is also this passion for learning and making an impact that has her teaching as an Affiliate Instructor at the University of Washington. Farah believes in making an impact by championing causes close to her heart. She is the founder and president of the non-profit One Good Act (www.onegoodact.org), an organization focused on empowering those living below the poverty line, and a co-founder of Pakistani Women in Computing (www.pwic.org), where she works as an advocate for underrepresented populations in STEM fields.

As an experienced technology executive, Saadia Ehsan Khilji has led many large-scale high performing IT Organizations in fortune 200 companies, providing solutions in areas such as Digital Transformation, Employee Technology, Data Integrations, AI Operationalization & IT Service.    After completing her Masters in Information Systems Technology from The George Washington University, Saadia started her career journey as a software engineer and progressed while playing variety of roles, heading her way towards strategic organizational leadership.     Saadia is a passionate advocate for DEI and empowering women in technology, currently serving as the President in the Board of a non profit Organization, Pakistani Women in Computing & Chair of MassMutual ASIA Business Resource Group.

Novaira Masood is an engineering leader at Apple, where she manages multiple teams of researchers, prototypers and application developers, with the goal to enable creative expression on Apple's AR platform (ARKit).   Novaira has previously worked on R&D for numerous Hollywood movies in the field of performance capture, animation and simulation. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3681538/  She is also a strong advocate for Women Leadership in Technology and was previously president of Pakistani Women in Computing. She also helps organize the annual Women in Graphics lunch at Siggraph.

Muazma Zahid is a Data and AI leader working as Principal PM Manager at Microsoft Azure, where she enables customers to deploy the most demanding Data workloads on Azure. She has been a Data Engineer/Architect and Tech Speaker working on several Big Data, Cloud Computing, and AI Technologies. She is a LinkedIn Learning instructor with her course Breaking Bias in Tech and her ML research software is used in EKG machines all around the world.  Muazma is an advocate of diversity, equity, and inclusion. She is Women @ Microsoft ERG co-chair and leads various community building and DE&I initiatives both at work and outside of Microsoft such as Seattle Chapter Lead for AnitaB.org and advisor to Pakistani Women in Computing (PWiC).  Connect with Muazma at:  https://linktr.ee/muazma