After its debut last year, the Curate women’s conference is back — with many improvements and personalizations to make it the best one yet. The second annual Curate women’s conference will take place Saturday, Jan. 30 in the Searle Center.
This year’s conference features five breakout sessions that each focus on different aspects of female life. Participants will have the opportunity to choose a lecture within each of these five categories so they can customize the experience to their needs and interests.
“There are sessions on health and wellness, spiritual life, relationships, leadership, and lifestyle,” Dean of Women Rebekah Dell said. “We added an additional breakout session and increased the number of speakers from last year, so each woman will have an opportunity to attend more of these sessions.”
Another new addition to this year’s conference is the implementation of a lunch hour—time for the participants to discuss the events of the day. Last year, women who attended the conference ate during one of the mid-day sessions.
Dell described how last year, women would gather after each session to compare notes and discuss what they had just learned, so the directors decided to provide intentional time for these interactions.
“We thought lunchtime would be a good place for a midday break with peers to talk,” Dell said. “I believe a lot of the speakers will be present too, so it’s an opportunity to catch up with the speakers in a more informal way.”
The Curate directors decided to conclude the day with a Q&A session with a panel of speakers from the event.
“It’s an opportunity to take a lot of different ideas and perspectives and little nuggets of wisdom and pull it all together,” Dell said.
Senior Abbie Patrick said she’s very excited to attend Curate for the first time.
“I think this will be a lot of fun,” Patrick said. “A lot of really cool women are speaking about very relevant things, and I’m excited to go and learn alongside my friends.”
Junior Maggie Deporre attended the Curate conference last year and said she loved every moment of it. Deporre noted that having speakers from the Hillsdale community added to the intimacy of the event because you were able to learn from and grow with the women you see on campus every day.
“The keynote speaker told us to go out and take control of our future, and she made us write down goals,” Deporre said. “I actually just achieved the goal that I had set a year ago, so it was really cool to take lessons away from the conference.”
Sign-ups are still open for those who want to attend the conference and can be found on the Curate website.