Hello readers! I'm Nandita Paranjape, a second-year student at UC Irvine studying computer science and business information management, interested in software engineering and product management. In this blog, I will be sharing my day-by-day chronicles of my GHC 2025 experience. I was incredibly excited to attend such a big conference, meet so many interesting people, and collect some pretty great swag. Through this conference, I wanted to gain experience, talk to people in the industry, and just understand what conferences are like.
Woke up bright and early at 3:30 AM and coordinated our Uber to the airport. We got through TSA pretty fast, and I tried a McDonald’s McGriddle for the first time. I didn’t realize it was basically a pancake sandwich, which caught me very off guard, but it did the job at that hour.
Our flight took off at 6:45 AM, and we landed in Chicago around 1 PM.
Then we hopped on the train for another hour to get to our hotel. I saw the fall colors on the way! The leaves were actually brown and red, which was wild to see as someone who has lived in California forever.
Train
Chicago!
When we reached the hotel, they told us we couldn’t check in until 4 PM, so we headed straight to McCormick Place to pick up our GHC badges.
GHC 2025 Cohort!
Badge pickup
We took a group photo, and by then everyone was starving, so we walked over to a nearby place called Steve’s Bite.
I got a Chicken Philly because I don’t eat red meat, and seeing a Philly cheesesteak but with chicken was too cool to pass up. Megan and I split it, and it was really good! But that was just the warm-up because we had a second dinner planned for 8 PM…
Chicken Philly
Hot Pot
After heading back and finally checking into the hotel, we showered and dropped off our stuff. Then it was already time for round two: Haidilao Hot Pot for Meat O’Clock at 8 PM. We ordered so much food.
After that, we went back and went straight to bed because the next day was the first day of GHC!
We woke up bright and early for day two (which was actually day one of GHC). We headed downstairs for our hotel's free breakfast, which I ended up liking a lot throughout the trip.
Before the conference at breakfast, we planned to meet with Jovanay from the Dev Difference. Recently, Karen and I hosted her for a WICS event about conference preparation, so it was really nice getting to meet her in person right before we went to the conference!