By Caryn Weferling
Last year, as a first-time attendee at the HCCA Compliance Institute, I was a bit overwhelmed with so much information, education, sights, and sounds. As a second-time attendee attender at the HCCA Compliance Institute this year, I decided to try something new – Speed Mentoring! I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I thought it was an interesting concept, and I was open to trying something new.
Luckily for me, the 7:30 am Speed Mentoring session on the pre-conference day still felt like 10:30 AM while still on east coast time, so it wasn’t as difficult to attend as I expected after my first night on the strip. At Speed Mentoring, you pre-register and are then assigned a seat for the 7 rounds of networking. I was able to (quickly) chat with several new folks, learning about them both professionally and personally. I gained a lot of new knowledge about other compliance fields, as well as gaining a new feeling of friendship with these peers from all over the country.
But what I appreciated the most from the Speed Mentoring session, was seeing those folks later on, throughout the conference. Seeing them at the sessions I attended, passing them in the hallways, and seeing them in the Exhibit Hall was wonderful. Seeing the peers I met during Mentoring throughout the day, made this enormous conference feel a little smaller!