 Great, thank you, everyone. So I want to take you back. My team and I had been working for nine months, preparing for a three-day long conference for 130 LGBTQ undergraduate engineers called the Out for Undergrad Conference. We brought in professors to help us develop our communications curriculum. We had labored over the word choices and discussion guides. And we had rehearsed our transitions between sessions until they were flawless. I was so excited to send out the post conference feedback because I expected rave reviews of the great discussions we had or the snacks we procured from sponsors. And when we got their feedback a few weeks later, I was surprised to see that almost none of that detail orientation had mattered. In fact, time after time, students talked about the incredible conversations they had had with sponsors and other participants. For most students, it was the first time they'd ever met a successful, happy, professional, LGBTQ adult. As one student put it, I used to think I was the only LGBTQ engineer. And now I know 200 of them. No amount of programming we could develop would compare with showing a student what their life could be like. How many of you, if I asked, and I'm going to, could think of an adult who showed you what your life could be like as an adult? Yeah, right, lots of us. So for some of us, it's parents. For others, it's peers or slightly older peers, older relatives, colleagues, bosses. I know for myself I have people that fit all those roles. My dad has shown me how to work around professionally. Older gay peers having their first kids have shown me what my family life might look like a few years down the road. And I also noticed a few of you didn't raise your hands. And I get that as well. I know for me personally, I don't know what life looks like for myself and my partner, 20 years down the line with kids. It's a black box. I have no idea. So whether or not we label them as such, all these people are mentors in our lives. Now, I want to talk about, just like with our undergraduate engineers, I want us to unravel this concept of what we think about as mentorship. It is not an all-knowing expert giving us explicit guidance. It's guidance or direction given just by an experienced person. Now, when we think about these people that we just had in our heads, we didn't think about them because they have all the answers or that they've experienced every possible iteration of how life could go. We thought about them because they were maybe just a step or two ahead of us showing us the way, showing us where they'd missed. We trusted them to be honest, and we trusted their advice. Now, what is required with mentorship is providing that guidance or direction. We can be someone's North Star simply by showing an example of what life could be like. And sometimes that example doesn't even need to say anything. We just need to be visible. Now, of course, sometimes we do need to say something. And in that case, it's important for us to share honestly our path. And candidly, I've had some trial and errors along that way. So let's go back to my first Alpha undergrad. It was in New York City, and I was a small group mentor for a group of aspiring LGBTQ undergraduate business people. Now, if you think about a career business conference in your head, you might be thinking about lots of collars perhaps a certain disregard for the status quo. I want to tell you it was a lot of dark suits and conservative ties, the dress code of finance. I looked a little bit different then. I had long hair. Was it a chic little dress? We can picture that. And I was one of the only women at the conference. It was largely white, largely male, and dark suits. Jay was one of the students in my group. And after a full weekend talking about the importance of authenticity and being yourself in the workplace, Jay came up to me after our last small group meeting. Just how formal is the dress code in finance and consulting, they asked. Now, in a crowd of suits, Jay stood out. Jay rocked a great beard, bright red lip color, and a long string of pearls. I froze because I knew the honest answer and I knew the answer that Jay probably wanted to hear given they were at this conference. Jay, there is a dress code. Men are expected to dress one way. Women are expected to dress another. There currently really isn't an in-between. I wish it weren't that way. I'm not saying it's right, but that is what I see right now. I saw Jay deflate in front of my eyes. And as Jay walked out into the hallway, the thought in my head was crap. I have failed. Honesty was not the right call. I should have told them that they can be the change that they want to see in the world, that they should set the new status quo, but I didn't. But I also knew that in order to change the system, they needed to get in. And in order to get in, I knew that they did need to go by that dress code, that I knew it to be true. Now, Jay has gone on to do incredible things for the right of LGBTQ folks in the US. And it is not from a position in finance or consulting. So I feel less bad now. I want to take you to a later up front or grad, where I was having coffee with a student we'll call E. E was going to the same college I'd graduated from and wanted to hear what my career was like. I was just about to come into graduate school and was thinking about applying. And I had given a lot of thought to what I did and did not like about my career so far. So I gave them the full spectrum of my experience from the exhaustion of four-day-a-week travel to the thrill of working on teams with some of the smartest people I'd ever met. And I could see E just be overwhelmed with the amount of information I was dumping, but I could tell that she really needed it. So I walked out of that coffee chat and completely forgot about it. Didn't even think about it. No guilt, but also not not not not worthy. Couple months ago, E and I got to reconnect at a conference. She came up to me in between sessions and said, I don't think you remember this conversation. But the conversation we had about your job totally changed my career trajectory. Going into that conversation, I had thought I was going to go into consulting. And then talking to you, I realized I had no idea what it entailed. And that actually, I wanted to be closer to tech. I ended up being a software engineer. If we hadn't had that conversation, if you hadn't been honest, I wouldn't be where I am today. Now I gotta tell you, E should be in tech. She is killing it and absolutely incredible. And at the time, even now, I couldn't have told her that, that was my place. I could have just told her honestly my own story. Now, the takeaway is not that I scare people away from consulting, though that is perhaps a takeaway. It's that mentorship and sharing our honest witnessing of our paths with folks who are underrepresented in particular fields is extremely important. And I wanna turn my folks a little bit now to STEM. And particularly, Captain Barrington Irving. So Captain Irving is the youngest and first African-American to fly solo around the world. And how he got into this path is he was in a grocery store and struck up a conversation with a pilot. He said, have you ever thought about flying planes? Captain Irving said, no, I don't think I'm, I don't think I'm smart enough for that. Captain said, come sit in the cockpit of my Boeing 777 and see what you think. That would probably convince me too. Captain Irving ended up signing up for aviation college and ended up being the youngest person to fly around the world. Now looking back at that, he said, you know, what did that guy do differently? He just showed me what he did. He just provided an example that that's something that I could do too. Now I could share anecdotes all day, but I did promise a little bit of evidence. But the problem with evidence about mentorship is it's really hard to directly say mentorship drives some impact, but it's really easy to show a demand for mentorship. Oh, and there's a lot of anecdotes, anecdotes and thought pieces talking about mentorship in underrepresented groups. So let's talk about facts instead, because I'm a scientist. So the Q Research Center did a survey where they looked at folks who in the US who are in STEM jobs and asked them what they perceived as the barriers to greater populations of underrepresented people in STEM. 72% thought that specifically blacks and Hispanics were not encouraged to pursue these subjects from an early age. 69% thought that this was due to a lack of Hispanic, black and Hispanic role models in these fields. Now worth noting about these numbers? This is just whole US population in STEM jobs. This is not just if you draw out black and Hispanic folks in STEM fields. If you just draw out those numbers, you just draw out those population, these numbers shoot up even higher. Now at the end of the survey, the participants were asked what actions should be taken to change this, to bring more underrepresented people into STEM. And it all kept coming back to visibility. Black women need to be invited into the classroom to show that there are others out there that are blazing the trails for them. Introduce them to role models and mentors. Teach them about women who have made contributions to STEM and not just white women, but women of all backgrounds. Now, you might be thinking, Shannon talked about LGBTQ stuff for the first half of this talk. Where are your numbers for LGBTQ folks? And they're not here because they don't exist. We just agreed that there's even a retention problem with LGBTQ folks in STEM in 2018. I'm not about to wait around for a study that shows that LGBTQ mentorship works in STEM to start doing what I know works. I'm not an expert in mentorship. The researchers are. I'm not an expert, but I do know that I'm able to honestly share my experience, what I've learned from it. And I don't want to let the self-knowledge that there's so much that I don't know. Keep me from sharing what I do. Now, you don't have to be an expert or older or perfect to be a mentor. The person sitting next to you right now, the undergrad in your class, a younger relative, is all wondering how you got to where you are today. And that is an opportunity for mentorship in and of itself. Being a mentor requires that you honestly share your path and experience. And I encourage you all to do that. Thank you.