Session: Cultivating Your Own Personal Board of Directors for Career Growth
Mentorship, sponsorship and allyship are all vital elements of nurturing career environment, but it can be difficult to achieve the right balance between all three. Women tend to be over-mentored and under-sponsored, and far fewer have allies—even though it’s often the small steps through allyship that can really drive substantial shifts in a woman’s career. One of the best ways to address this gap is by cultivating a network of people—a personal Board of Directors—that can start off as mentors, evolve into allies and ultimately become sponsors. The Board can go beyond the traditional mentorship model, ultimately enabling true allies that can advocate on your behalf behind closed doors. This presentation will explain what a Personal Board of Directors is, how women can start to build their own Board and how to best leverage that Board to help supercharge their careers.
Bio
Diana Albarrán Chicas is the Power Propulsion Element (PPE) Deputy Program Manager at Maxar responsible for the power and thermal program and for shaping future business opportunities tied to new space exploration missions. Specifically, Diana is involved with Maxar’s PPE program that will provide power, maneuvering, attitude control, communications systems and initial docking capabilities for NASA’s lunar Gateway, thereby enabling NASA’s Artemis mission.
Outside of her role at Maxar, Ms Albarrán Chicas is the co-founder of the Latinas in STEM Foundation and served as an Advisor to Latina SciGirls, a PBS Kids show that exposes elementary and middle-school girls to STEM careers. She was born in Mexico and came to the United States under her parents’ vision of a better life for their children, becoming the first person in her family to graduate from high school. She graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in Electrical Engineering.
Ms. Albarrán Chicas has been widely recognized for her achievements. She has been awarded the Trail Blazer Award by Silicon Valley Latino, featured as a New Guard of STEM Stars by Vanity Fair, named a Women in STEM Honoree by Girlstart and one of the "Top 20 Latinos in Tech" by CNET, among other recognitions.