Elizabeth Farkas
@ 2019 IEEE Rising Stars Conference
“During this conference, I attended a cybersecurity competition, technical panels about upcoming tech topics such as 5G and space exploration, professional development panels on project management and team building, and networking events. These networking breakout sessions between panels and during meals were incredibly valuable (and fun) because I got to talk to students, young professionals, and professionals from across the country about their interests and career paths. I personally gained insight into how to pursue project management and a career in embedded systems but also learned about other career paths in medical devices and aerospace.”
Victor Cortez
@ FLICON
“During my time at FLICON I was able to learn how to create and keep valuable bonds/connections between staff or employers. I was also able to connect and network with other first generation/low income students. Throughout the event I also learned of things that I can bring back to UCSD and help empower the First generation/Low Income community on campus as we need an area to feel safe and unite as one.”
Xuanang Li
@ 2019 IEEE VLSI Test Symposium
“My first authored paper was accepted to the conference. This is my first time giving a technical presentation about my research work. I spent a lot of time improving my presentation skills and prepared to answer any questions from other professors, PhD students, and industrial people. During the conference, I met a lot of people that are interested in my research. I also listened to a bunch of talks in the field of hardware testing and security that represent the state of the art development in these fields.”
Ammar Salem
@ Associated Schools of Construction Reno Student Competition
“The Design-Build team that I am the captain of has been preparing for this competition under the guidance of Clark Construction for about 8 months. The competition starts Thursday at 5:30 am where an actual construction company gives us an actual project they worked on, and they ask to respond to the proposal. This includes budget, schedule, design, changes to the original proposal, and etc. We are given until 9 pm to submit our response to the company, and then we are given another 2 hours to finish up a presentation for the next day. The presentation is made up of 6 judges who will judge the 16 schools and pick a winner based upon what they submitted and the presentation. The following day is a career fair that is the largest on the west coast with over 150 companies there looking to recruit students from all over the country. We learned real-life problem solving, meeting with industry professionals, and presentation skills which we all benefited from greatly.”
Amanda Breton
@ SACNAS: The National Diversity in STEM Conference
“It was an amazing conference to experience. I was able to experience a very supportive and collaborative environment and connected with many people outside of UC San Diego as well as some at UC San Diego who I met by chance. I was able to attend a GEM Grad Labs session which I feel helped not only convince me to go to graduate school, but also prepared me for looking for funding. Additionally, I was able to meet many different graduate schools and see many different types of research, which helped me think about what I want to study in the future. I met a researcher at Brown University who was doing very interesting research that was somewhat similar to my own, and he gave me his business card to keep him in mind for when I apply to graduate school, which was very cool.”
Eric Schnell
@ Military Additive Manufacturing Summit
“I was able to meet with industry representatives in additive manufacturing and military personnel working on the deployment of 3D printers in the Department of Defense. I was able to see the state of the technology and its implementation and creat networking opportunities that I will be following up on during weeks to come for potential sponsorship and contracts.”
Antony Nguyen
@ IEEE Rising Stars
“It was a tremendous experience learning from so many people with so many years of life experience. Just as importantly, I connected with students from other IEEE branches from around the entire world. I did an Arduino workshop with students from branches in Korea, played board games until 4 am with officers from UCSB (Who I just earlier today had a meeting with them to discuss future collaborative activities since I happened to be at UCSB for SB Hacks), and met up with old friends from Berkeley, Stanford, and Texas A&M. Of course, like any other conference, I also learned a lot from panels and talks. But above all else, it was the people who I connected with and befriended that made the experience valuable. It not only gave me greater insight on how I could better run UCSD's IEEE Student Branch, but also showed me ways to better act as a person, both professionally and personally.”
Atharv (Terry) Worlikar
@ oSTEM's 8th Annual Conference
“Our group had a productive time at the conference. We were able to network with students from other universities as well as industry representatives from companies such as Genentech, Freenome, Raytheon, ExxonMobil, and the CIA. In addition, one student, Michelle Holland, won the award for Best Poster Presentation on their research for fluoroquinolones. Plus, the UCSD CSE department was able to table at the Grad school and Career fair, reaching out to potential CSE grad students.”
Nathan Basa
@ UIST
“UIST was my first research conference, and I gained a lot of knowledge, contacts, and motivation from this event. I learned more about what students at other universities and companies are doing in the area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). I listened to paper presentations and found them interesting and applicable to our work. We demoed our interface and I had plenty of insightful conversations about what they see can be done with our multimodal search interface.”
Minghua Ong
@ Forbes 30 Under 30 Summit
“Being at the conference was an incredibly surreal experience. Not only did I get to see leading professionals across industry (Kevin Durant! Jonny Sun! Trevor Martin!), I also got to discover the up and coming. For me, that was the best part. I'm interested in rehabilitative engineering, which is an uncentralized field, and until this conference, I wasn't exactly sure what my field looked like. Seeing all these cool start ups gave me an idea of what to. strive for. My favorite start-ups weren't even directly rehabilitative, and it was awesome to hear their story. I felt like I deeply connected with the representatives from Mentally VR-- a revolutionary VR therapy service to make mental health resources more accessible. I also got to attend an unconventional hackathon! In the span of an hour and a half to two hours, my team and I had to create a solution for harmful algal blooms in the Great Lakes region.”
Check out the 2014-2015 STF recipients here
Check out the 2015-2016 STF recipients here