8 IEEE PULSE ▼ JULY/AUGUST 2010 On to Higher Grounds… After the success of the first PAUER conference, I was approached by a rep- resentative from the Penn Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (CURF). CURF‘s mission is to inform and support Penn students interested in conducting research and applying for fellowships. CURF wanted advice for the creation of its own undergraduate research conference, which led to the launch of the CURF-sponsored Penn Un- dergraduate Research Symposium. CURF has the advantage of having its own fi- nancial resources, and its influence spans all four schools at Penn. It eventually be- came apparent that the Second Annual PAUER Research Conference could not compete with a university-wide research symposium; hence, the PAUER confer- ence merged with the CURF-sponsored research symposium, which was held on 4 February 2010. The future role of PAUER is somewhat unclear; in fact, because of the success of the CURF- sponsored symposium, PAUER may no longer need to exist. However, it was the creation of PAUER that helped ac- complish the initial goal, which was to establish a university-wide undergradu- ate conference at Penn. Matthew C.Canver, the guest writer of this issue‘s “Student‘s Corner” column, gradu- ated from Penn in May 2010 with a B.S.E. degree in bioengineering. He will be pursu- ing an M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School in August 2010. Cristian A. Linte, column editor, is cur- rently studying at the University of Western Ontario (Laboratory for Image-Guided Sur- gery and Therapy in the Imaging Research Laboratories at the Robarts Research Institute in London, Canada) toward a Ph.D. degree in biomedical engineering. FIGURE 3 Undergraduate students viewing the research posters during the 2009 PAUER conference. L ast year, I attended the IEEE Engi- neering in Medicine and Biology Conference (EMBC 2009) held in Minneapolis. This was my first EMBC and the fourth international conference so far. Given the usual scale and standard of EMBC, I was genuinely excited about it, and I am glad to have attended it. I was excited because my paper was accepted, which was going to be my first conference publication, and was also excited because I was visiting the United States for the first time. I would meet new faces and make new friends, and I would get a chance to personally meet well-known people in the field of biomedical engineering and would be able to listen to what they had to say about the forefront of current research. I think, from an individual point of view, there can be numerous things that can go wrong in a conference. If the con- ference is too big you get lost and cannot make the most of it. You may find some or many of the sessions irrelevant or of little use (hence boring), and so your enthusiasm fades as a result; or you may find yourself as a complete stranger in the crowd as you know very few or none of the attendees. For my part, I will con- centrate on positives I have come across in this conference and, most importantly, what matters to me as a Ph.D. student. My Work I presented my paper in a poster format at EMBC 2009, for which I received a good response from the enquiring and curious audience. Two things in particu- lar came out of my presentation; I met a fellow researcher who had worked in the past on a project based on similar grounds, with whom I have established a contact for further correspondence. Second, I received some tricky but inter- esting questions about my work, which I had never previously thought about and were worth exploring. It is easy to be too engrossed in a project to notice impor- tant avenues requiring investigation that are immediately obvious to others. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPUL.2010.937248 My First EMB Conference, EMBC 2009: An Experience Amit Narahar Pujari