The Women of the Mountains conference held from October 7^th to October 9^th 2015 gave me the opportunity to be involved in a student/teacher organized event hosted by Utah Valley University (UVU) in Orem, UT. My responsibilities during the Women of the Mountains conference included collecting and organizing presentations, ensuring equipment functionality, helping to ensure that event schedule flowed smoothly, addressing technical issues as they arose, and trying to help Tony Medina, Vice President for Logistics and Protocol, organizing committee of the conference, with parking. I participated in the event on Wednesday October 7^th and Friday October 9^th. Another student, Brian Nielsen and I split the times that we would be covering support at the conference. I am going to detail my participation in the conference and discuss my experience during the Women of the Mountains conference

Celeste Mergens, Chair, NGO “Days for Girls,” during her keynote presentation

 The Women of the Mountain conference began in the Reagan Theater at UVU. Things started off a little chaotic. When the program started I was scrambling to get the presentations for the people that were just getting to the Ragan Theater. During the introduction of the program I worked with the technicians in the media box at the top of the theater to get the presentations on their computer. We could have used my computer for the presentations but that would make changing slides during each presentation less natural for the presenters. Giving the technicians the PowerPoints allowed them to easily transition as presenters finished, and also gave the presenters control of changing slides. After Celeste Mergens, the first keynote speaker, Chair of the famous NGO “Days for Girls,” spoke about providing young women the essential hygiene products, the Women of the Mountains conference moved to UVU’s library. At this point events split into several panel sessions.

My job moved from the Reagan Theater to the Lakeview room of the UVU library where I helped with the panel session on Economic Issues of Women & Children. Here I worked with a UVU technician named Daniel, and Mary Cisneros, UVU student and session moderator, to ensure that all of the equipment functioned properly. We used my laptop to run PowerPoints; after seeing how smoothly presentations went when presenters had a remote control for PowerPoint I decided to check one out from the library. Before presentations started I was able to get almost everyone’s slides. I did not have time to organize all of them, but having them made things a little smoother. My job during the panel session on Economic Issues of Women & Children was a lot more involved than it was in the Reagan Theater. It was my duty to help each presenter get their slides going, making sure they know how to use the remote to control the movement from one slide to the next, and assisting with technical issues that arose.

I ran into a couple of technical issues at the panel session. The first was a display issue for pictures that were not a part of a PowerPoint presentation. The pictures were meant to be shown after the PowerPoint presentation. I attempted to open and close the program that pictures were viewed through, as well as trying to unplug and plug back in the display port that was connected to the television screens. In the end we were not able to get the pictures up on the screen and were short on time so we had to move forward. The second technical issue was the volume on a video being too high. This was an easy fix; a quick adjustment of the volume on my computer put the volume at the right level. Immediately after the high volume problem, we had an issue with the volume of a video being too quiet. I tried to adjust the volume on my Surface Pro as well as UVU’s equipment. Nothing seemed to work. We were not able to hear the volume on this video. Though we ran into several issues the presenters were really great to be able to continue on with their presentations.

Certificate of Appreciation Presented to me by the Mountain Partnership representatives for my contribution

to the Fourth International Women of the Mountains Conference

At the Conference on Friday October 9^th I helped Tony Medina, VP for Logistics and Protocol, with parking. I waited outside for people to show up. A van with people pulled up, they got out, and thought I was the person they were looking for. I too ought that they were the people I was looking for; we walked together for a few hundred feet before realizing we were all going to the wrong place. Eventually we realized that everyone that we were expecting had found their way to Center Stage at UVU. At this point the rest of the day was in full swing, technicians from UVU were staying through the rest of the conference, so I headed home. My experience at the Women of the Mountains conference gave me an opportunity to work with students and teachers to hear from amazing people from around the globe how they are trying to make the world a better place.

             Casey Rowley, UVU student and UIMF member