Interview with Charlotte Pollard, Speaker Series Coordinator
by Camille Shen
From CEOs and VPs to government officials, the WiB Speaker Series has hosted a multitude of distinguished guests in its short history, and yet, none who have had to take up this year’s challenge like Marne Levine, former COO of Instagram and White House Chief of Staff. Through a virtual platform, Marne delivered an empowering address to an all-time high number of attendees, including those from other institutions across the country. We sat down with Charlotte Pollard (class of 2021), the event’s head coordinator, to discuss more about putting together the Fall 2020 Speaker Series, in all of its challenges and unexpected lessons.
1. What was it like organizing the Speaker Series this year, given the circumstances?
It required a lot of flexibility and creativity, because we’ve obviously never done it before and it was something unprecedented. We also had to be open minded in what it would like and how we would get people to attend, that sort of thing. But at the same time, our biggest priority was making sure it was still fun and engaging, and felt like you were in-person and really having a conversation. Obviously, everyone has Zoom burnout and we wanted to make this event something that didn’t contribute to that, but was more of just time away and truly fun and engaging.
2. The turnout this year was actually the highest we’ve ever had-- why do you think that it is?
I think it’s a combination of things. Obviously, every year people learn more and more about the Speaker Series, and I think our marketing team did an awesome job with that. I think Marne also kind of speaks for herself, since she has such a breadth of experience which was really impactful. We also reached out to a lot of organizations; my team is really great about being systematic and saying, “Okay, here are all the things on campus and these are all the GroupMes I can send things into”, and just making sure we were getting across as many different groups on campus as possible. We also invited Northwestern and Stanford WiBs to join as well, which added to our attendance. That was really great in terms of building out the WiB community, and now Stanford’s even invited us to their Speaker Series.
3. What is something that you took away from Marne’s series that made it different from the years past?
Emily White, [last year’s speaker], was very casual and everything, too, but I think Marne was very laid back and relaxed and truly wanted it to be a conversation. I think that I really related to her a lot, in the sense that she said that she always feels like she’s moving very quickly and needed to focus on solving the right problem rather than solving everything. You have to figure out what the right problem is to solve, and then you can actually solve it more effectively. So I think that was really good, salient advice for me in particular, but I also think for a lot of people. I also really appreciated what she said about following your instincts and following your gut, because that tends to be something we don’t do enough of. It’s nice to hear– we know in the back of our head that we should be, and we all have that inclination and tingling that we need to listen to, so it’s nice to hear someone reinforce that and say, “Yes, this should be guiding you. You don’t need to be rational and so logical all the time.”
4. As the head organizer, what is the most rewarding part of putting together the Speaker Series?
I think that the most rewarding part, obviously, is the event itself and hearing everything she says to me and how impactful it is for me, but then multiplying that across the number of people that were there– we had almost 190, I think– so just understanding that this level of impact was being made is really awesome. And just the fact that we were able to, as a community, pull that off and pull it together is great. We all received such great feedback after, both from people in WiB and from my friends who were just coming because they wanted to; they all thought she was really great. It was really nice to hear that other people also felt like they learned a lot, because that’s the purpose of this: it’s not like you’re taking a class and learning that way, but it’s about the experience and taking a moment of reflection to hear from someone who’s done great things.
5. What goes into choosing a speaker for the event? Is there anything you’ve learned from this year that might affect who you choose in the future?
I think it’s really important that we’re bringing speakers to campus that people actually want to listen to, and that we’re hearing the ideas of those in WiB and beyond for people that we should try and bring. I think that’s what’s exciting, that then we can build a team around getting this person to come speak who we actually know people want to come listen to, which is something good to keep in mind. We found out about Marne through someone on our exec team, and we just kind of pushed and pushed and made it happen. I think we can do that because there was that impetus there– we knew that we had a connection and we had built a connection with Marne before we even made actual contact with her. If you want someone to come and speak, we can make that happen, so reach out and have suggestions.
6. Do you have any takeaways from this year’s event that you may want to keep in mind for a future Speaker Series?
Definitely. Now we’ve done it virtually, so we know that it’s possible and that we can do it. If there’s ever a speaker that we really want to come and speak with us, but it’s just not feasible for them to make the trip to Nashville in their schedule, we know that it works, we know that it works well, and we know that people will come. I think that that’s really encouraging. I also think that Marne’s amazing; I never would have in a million years expected that she would have been able to come and speak with us. Now we have that mindset of just going for it and shooting for the moon– if we can get her to speak, awesome, and if not, we’re not expecting that, but we shouldn’t sell WiB short regardless. We can get amazing people to come and want to educate us, speak to us, and have a conversation with us. That's really important moving forward: trying for as many different speakers as we can get, anyone that we think would be interesting.