The Grace Series honors the contributions of real-life women in science with the goal of inspiring and encouraging more of them to pursue STEM careers. The Grace Series introduced its second speaker, Chief Technology Officer & SVP for Catalyst Corporate Credit Union, Diana Hennel. Ms. Hennel currently serves as Chief Technology Officer for Catalyst Corporate Credit Union.  She prides herself on building strong teams and delivering innovative, industry-changing software.  Over the course of her thirty-year career, her teams have modernized the check processing industry, streamlined financial operations for the National Bank of Singapore, and experimented with cryptocurrency for credit unions.  She was recently recognized as one of Dallas’ leading women in technology for her innovative work in bringing digital products to market.  Outside of work, she lives in Frisco with her husband of twenty years and her identical twin boys.  Diana is heavily involved in her community, including serving as a board member of High Tech High Heels, an organization dedicated to growing women in STEM.  

Ms. Hennel presented her talk titled “Leveraging Your Experiences to Make Stone Soup.” In her talk, she shared her experiences from her thirty-year career how she’s taken some of her most significant successes and failures and used those to create her own career concoction.  She also provided some insight into identifying and synthesizing those key ingredients to create a personal brand.

She started off her talk by introducing to the audience the story of Stone Soup. Stone Soup is a European folk story in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal that everyone enjoys. The moral of the story highlights the value of sharing for the greater good. For Ms. Hennel’s talk, she decided to use tips and insights as the ingredients in her own stone soup that she would share with the audience. She stated, “Your career is like stone soup – along the way, you will add ingredients.” Below is a list of those ingredients and what they entail. 

1. Know why you are there – make sure you like the work you will be doing at your job. Whether you join a big, small, or mid-size company – you will find the best fit for you. Figure out your work-life balance; you will need to figure out if you are living to work or working to live. The last thing is to know when to leave. When you stop getting something out of your job, or you have lost your passion, or don’t see any growth opportunity, then it might be time for you to move on.

2. Network – Find yourself a mentor, or two or three. Someone who can give your career guidance, someone you trust, someone who can tell you the honest truth. Having those people that you can bounce ideas off of is critical. You don’t have to like everyone in your network, but you have to respect them.

3. Build Great Teams – As you’re starting your career, you’re building your workplace relationships, and you should start surrounding yourself with positive, smart people. Build teams with different viewpoints to diversify your network. Don’t just look for people who think like you. Look for people who think differently than you.

4. Take Risks – You should be taking risks both personally and professionally. Ms. Hennel’s first risk was to go to graduate college. Risks and opportunities are everywhere. Go out in the world and start your own company; you will learn more than even raising your own kids. You will learn all aspects of the business world. It takes a special person to be an entrepreneur.

5. Fail – Failing is hard, but you will learn more from failing than from your successes. It’s hard to see through such experiences at the time, but looking back, it’s easier

6. Own it – Nobody will care more about your career than you. Seek out feedback. Take it to heart. Always have one or two things you are working on to get better at. Always have an updated resume and have an interview once a year just to make sure you are staying current with the market. Another piece of advice is to dress for the position you want, not the position you have. Understanding influence and perceptions of yourself. Always think before you go into a room: what am I trying to get out of this encounter? 

Throughout her talk, she would occasionally ask the students to participate in a QR poll where she would ask the audience questions such as “What characteristics do you think are most important for a successful career?” The audience response included perseverance, time management, passion, amongst others.

She ended her list of ingredients by saying, “In the end, if you aren’t having fun at what you are doing and you are losing passion, then find something that you love. Your generation is going to have many different career changes.” Ms. Hennel reminded the audience about building their network and how important it was to find a mentor. She said, “Don’t surround yourself with just technologists. Find people outside the tech world to build your network. Remember that a good mentor gets the pleasure of watching you grow.”

Since the inception of the UT Dallas Grace Series in the spring of 2015, a total of forty-two inspiring women and men have spoken, including:

1. Bhavani Thuraisingham, Louis A. Beecherl Jr. Distinguished Professor, UT Dallas CS Professor, and Executive Director of the UT Dallas Cyber Security Research and Education Institute (CSI) (click here for her story)
2. Lily Wu, UT Dallas CS Professor and Director of the Data Communication and Data Management (DCDM) Laboratory (click here for her story)
3.  I-Ling Yen, UT Dallas CS Professor (click here for her story)
4. Ranran Feng, UT Dallas CS Professor (click here for her story)
5. Sanda Harabagiu, UT Dallas CS Professor, Erik Jonsson School Research Initiation Chair, and Director of the UT Dallas Human Language Technology Research Institute (HLTRI) (click here for her story)
6. Rym Zalila-Wenkstern, UT Dallas CS Professor and Director of the Multi-Agent and Visualization Systems lab (click here for her story)
7. Inga H. Musselman, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost for The University of Texas at Dallas (click here for her story)
8. Jo Zhang of Fujitsu Laboratories of America (click here to read her story),
9. Farokh Bastani, UT Dallas CS Professor, Excellence in Education Chair, and Director of the UT Dallas site of the NSF Net-centric and Cloud Software and Systems Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (NSF NCSS I/UCRC) (click here to read his story)
10. Peggy Shadduck, Director of both the Dallas County Community College District (DCCCD) STEM Institute and the Dallas/North Texas STEM Degree Accelerator Program (click here to read her story)
11. Lymari Ames of Cisco Systems (click here to read her story)
12. Romelia Flores, an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Master Inventor (click here to read her story)
13. Jill Blanchar, a Bank of America Information Security Executive (click here to read her story)
14. Lisa Frey, State Farm Scrum Master (click here to read her story)
15. Kimberly Snipes, USAA, VP, Chief Information Officer (click here to read her story)
16. Catherine Walsh, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Loss Prevention for Johnson Controls’ Tyco Retail Solutions
17. Nimmi Kannankutty, Deputy Division Director in the Division of Graduate Education (DGE) at the National Science Foundation (NSF).
18. Karen Mazidi, UT Dallas CS Professor (click here to view her slides from her Grace Series Talk titled “Discovering Your Strengths”)
19. Grace Kaldawi, Senior Software Engineer for Capital One Auto Finance, Amazon Web Services Certified Solutions Architect, and UT Dallas CS Alumnus (click here to read more)
20. Sydeaka Watson, Senior Data Scientist at Korelasi Data Insights, LLC, an independent analytics consulting company (click here to read more)
21. Ewa Musial, Senior Software Engineer at Blackhawk Network (click here to read more or click here to view slides from her presentation)
22. Janell Straach, Rice University CS Professor, former UT Dallas CS professor, and one of the Grace Series founders (click here to read more or click here to view slides from her presentation)
23. Uni Yost, CEO/Founder of GoAskJay (click here to read more or click here to view slides from her presentation)
24. Smita Bakshi, President and Co-Founder of zyBooks (click here to read more or click here to view slides from her presentation)
25. Bhavani Thuraisingham, Louis A. Beecherl Jr. Distinguished Professor, UT Dallas CS Professor, and Executive Director of the UT Dallas Cyber Security Research and Education Institute (CSI) (click here to watch her talk)
26. Betty Stewart, Provost, Executive Vice-President for Academic Affairs, and tenured Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Texas at Dallas (click here to watch her talk)
27. Neeti Khaitan Gupta, President, and CEO of Accelerate Consulting Inc. (click here to watch her talk)
28. Juliet G. Odima, CSM, CSPO, Executive Director, STEAM Achievers Associate Vice President, and Director, School of Data Science and Analytics, Colaberry Inc. (click here to watch her talk)
29. Seda Mauer, Digital Accessibility Consultant at Seda Maurer Consulting (click here to watch her talk)
30. Shobana Radhakrishnan, Director of Engineering for Android TV at Google (click here to watch her talk)
31. Stephanie Adams, UT Dallas Erik Jonsson School Dean and Lars Magnus Ericsson Chair at The University of Texas at Dallas (click here to watch her talk)
32. Elisa Bertino, a Samuel D. Conte Professor of Computer Science Cyber2Slab at Purdue University (click here to watch her talk)
33. Fanny Dunagan, CEO & LinkedIn Content Strategist at Pathlynks (click here to watch her talk)
34. Tamara Bassam, Program Committee member for the DFW Alliance of Technology and Women (Click here to watch her talk)
35. Daphne Yao, Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, Elizabeth and James E. Turner Jr. ’56 Faculty Fellow and CACI Faculty Fellow (click here to watch her talk)
36. Maral Mesmakhosroshahi, Deep Learning Researcher at Microsoft, and Founder and President of Iranian Women in Computing, a nonprofit organization supporting Iranian women in tech in the United States (click here to watch her talk)
37. Bhavani Thuraisingham, Louis A. Beecherl Jr. Distinguished Professor, UT Dallas CS Professor, and Executive Director of the UT Dallas Cyber Security Research and Education Institute (CSI) (Click here to watch her talk)
38. Dr. Ling Liu, Professor in the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology (click here to watch her talk)
39. Saritha Reddy, Cybersecurity Leader and Director, Product Security at Capital One (click here to view her talk)
40. Pallabi Parveen, Principal-Big Data Software Engineer at AT&T (click here to watch her talk)
41. Dr. Ovidiu Daescu, UT Dallas Computer Science Department Head (click here to watch his talk)
42. Dianna Hennel, Chief Technology Officer & SVP for Catalyst Corporate Credit Union