The student-organized Women’s Leadership Conference on campus in late October was packed with two days of advice on how to rise above the ordinary, the theme for the 14th annual event.

First admitted to Georgia Tech in 1952, females now comprise 37 percent of the freshman class.

“We have had a steady flow of high-achieving women with fortitude and resolve who have shown us that women have the capacity to keep moving forward,” said Ivan Allen College Dean Jacqueline Jones Royster during introductory remarks at an evening awards banquet at the Georgia Tech Hotel. “Still we must rise above the ordinary as we all participate individually and collectively in what remains a significantly male environment and be the phenomenal women that those who have gone before us believed that we would be and those behind us still need us to be.”

Keynote speaker Betty Tong, ME 93, MS ME 95, said her path took a number of turns before she discovered her passion for thoracic surgery. “No pun intended, it was really what was in my heart.”

President of Omicron Delta Kappa and the Ramblin’ Reck Club while at Tech and the daughter of professor emeritus Yung Tong, she now is a professor at Duke University and a surgeon in a specialty field in which only about 7 percent of the physicians are women.
“I work in a very male-dominated field as many of you do and will. … I was never asked to go play golf on Saturday morning with the department chair. I don’t fly-fish, but I still did OK,” she said.

Tong has achieved success by following her passion, she said. “You can’t help what you fall in love with. Follow your heart.”

Martha Forlines, president of consulting, coaching, training and speaker services provider Belief Systems Institute, agreed with Tong.

“Think about what really makes your heart sing. What is something that truly, truly you feel emotional about? Hook your aspirations to those things,” said Forlines, co-author of Inspiring Women: Becoming Courageous, Wise Leaders, during a Saturday morning breakfast at the Student Center.

“Be clear about who you are. Be self-defined, not defined by others,” Forlines said. “While this sounds so simple on the surface, to really understand your strengths and maximize those and minimize your weaknesses is a critical, critical thing to focus on.”

Forlines said Lois Frankel’s Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office “identifies 101 unconscious things that women do to sabotage themselves at work. She writes that women play it way too safe in their work lives. If you look at work as being a playing field, women like to stay in the middle, and the reality is the game gets won on the edges and in the end zone.”

Trish Downing never played it safe. A competitive cyclist, Downing was on a bike ride with a friend in 2000 when her path was forever changed, she told her audience during the keynote lunch address.

“I’m thinking about all my dreams and my goals and my plans — all these things that I want to do — and all of a sudden I look up, and I see in front of me that there is a car … turning onto the side street that we were then crossing,” Downing said. “I went for my brakes, but I couldn’t get to them quickly enough. And the front wheel of my bike hit the front bumper of that car. I was launched, turning in the air, landing on my back on the windshield and falling to the ground. And right there, at the corner of 32nd and Crab Apple, I hit a crossroads and everything changed.”

Before the day ended, Downing was told she had suffered a chest-level spinal cord injury and would never walk again.

“Never. Have you ever thought about the word never? Imagine if you spent four years working so hard at Georgia Tech and never graduated? Or think about the person you love more than anyone in the world and then imagine never seeing that person again,” Downing said.

After more than three weeks in intensive care followed by a stint at a rehabilitation facility, Downing moved into a wheelchair-accessible condo.

“There were no doctors, no nurses, no friends visiting, no call buttons. And I was alone with my thoughts,” she said. “Then I started thinking, I’m right back where I was, at 32nd and Crab Apple Street. I’m at a crossroads. And here is where I make a decision. I make a decision to sit around and feel sorry for myself or I make a decision to do what you all are doing today and rise above the ordinary.”

She began training again, this time in a racing chair. “I needed to ride my own race,” Downing said. “My accident had derailed me, but it hadn’t stopped me. It was only up to me whether I was going to get back in the race or not.”

Downing eventually competed in the Ironman world championship triathlon in Hawaii and won the 2009 duathlon world championship.

“I think passion is the most important thing in your life in getting through the things that are difficult and in finding your way, in establishing your journey and finding your path. And if it weren’t for my passion of athletics, my passion to be the best I could possibly be, I wouldn’t have made it to where I am today,” she said.